Date
August 3, 2019
Area
, ,
Companion
wohhhohhh!! We're half way there!!
As of Monday I was officially half way done with my MTC stay, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. I know that my spanish has improved a lot, and my ability to teach has also improved, but I still don't feel like I'm ready to be a missionary. It is crazy how fast this has been going, it almost seems surreal. I'm loving it though. I almost feel like I should have always been here learning like this. It is so much more efficient than learning at school. Not only does everyone here have a desire to learn, but the spirit pushes us so hard, and our learning is faster, and we retain more than we ever did in school. It is totally awesome. I heard this week that the MTC tries to get 600-1000 hours of your assigned language in before we leave the MTC. I was amazed, because that means that we have 100+ hours of Spanish a week. No wonder it is so fast to learn the language. This week was also the end of our first TRc amigo. We get each amigo for two weeks, so as of Monday we will be starting with our second amigo. I'm actually really sad to see Benjamin leave, because he had a great desire to learn, and he was so receptive to feeling the spirit. It will be all good though. I guess we have to move on for the purpose of the training exercise. I would love to have another week with him though. I think that we could invite him to be baptized, and then turn him over to the missionaries in provo and let them finish and actually baptize him. I guess I just hope that his next set of missionaries feel the same way, and perhaps actually invite him to be baptized. I guess we will probably never know how it works out. Tuesdays are still by far my favorite day of the week. We wake up a bit early and do service for 75 minutes, and that evening we have a devotional. This Tuesday we got to hear from Sister Michelle Craig, who is the second counselor in the young women's general presidency. She said that every member needs to be bilingual regardless. We should be able to at least speak in our native tongue, and the language of the spirit. She then compared it to how just as with a spoken language, speaking the language of the spirit takes practice, trial and error, consistent use, hard work and a variety of other things that basically add up to hard work and a desire to actually learn. She did a good job of comparing it to our language learning here at the MTC and comparing our effort to learn the language of our mission to learning the language of the spirit. I thought that was totally awesome! All of our devotional speakers do a great job. Other than that I'm not sure how much I have to share. We kind of do the exact same thing everyday all week, so there aren't many different stories to tell. Below I have some pictures of the MTC campus, one of our group study sessions that kid of ended poorly (most of the people fell asleep, and me in-front of the really big world map here.