Last Day in the MTC

This is from Wednesday - March 23, 2016

So today is my last day in the MTC, it's actually kind of a bitter-sweet thing, I grew so close to everyone here and it will be hard/sad to leave them all behind. But I am also really excited to fly out to Kansas and grow to love everyone there.

So Friday I actually left my district and went to an "In Field Orientation" where they just tell us important stuff about what we need to do in the mission field, it was super boring. But it was informative, I think..? There was some play that was pretty funny.

Saturday, what would usually be a really relaxing day, is now just the same as any other day. We go to class, we go to gym (except we took a nap Saturday cause the gym was closed), we eat crappy cafeteria food, and study a lot. But it's all good! (except for the crappy food part)

Sunday! Sunday was definitely the highlight of the week, we all got to go to the first session of the temple dedication and for a lot of Elders and sisters it was their first time seeing a temple dedication. So there was a couple days in the past week when I was thinking about the song "Savior Redeemer of My Soul" during Sacrament meeting there was a sister who sang it for a special musical number and it was incredible! After Sacrament we had a special departure devotional for those missionaries leaving in the next week, me included, and the same sister sang that song again! THEN during our Sunday evening devotional there was a special musical number and an elder same that same exact song! But this time he was accompanied by a piano and a violin.

The Sunday devotional speaker was Merril J. Bateman, he was a former president of BYU and stuff. He talked about temples and the importance of having them in our lives. 

So there is this program at the MTC called the TRC, yeah they really like three letter abbreviations here, and it's basically where you get to experience what it would be like to teach real investigators. Everyone there is paid, and most are already members, but there are times when there are real investigators looking into the church. Anyway on Monday we started teaching two new investigators, Aaron and Nathan. Aaron is a very enthusiastic story teller and has had A LOT of experience with other religions. His biggest question was why do all of these people from different religions have these same spiritual experiences and why do we think the spirit in our church is so much different. I don't really remember what we said, but I think it was good.

Then there was Nathan...Oh boy. He was 100% not a member, so it was 100% a real life teaching experience. He asked a lot of hard questions, like "where does God come from?" or "If God is our Heavenly Father, who is our Heavenly Mother?" and other questions that are really hard to answer and too long to write down in my email. But by the end of our three days with him we answered most of his questions to the best of our knowledge and ability, and it seems like he really came to a new knowledge and understanding of God and our purpose here. So that's good.

Tuesday was a lot of the same, crappy food, service, gym, and classroom instruction. We also lost the other half of our zone, so that was sad. Later in the evening we had a special Tuesday night devotional the speaker was Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the presidency of the seventy, he gave a really good talk about repentance. His talk was titled "Preach Repentance, Baptize Converts"

Today, Wednesday, was dramatically different. We still had gym time and a crappy breakfast but lunch...lunch was great. We had these delightful personal pizzas, but right as we were finishing up the fire alarm started going off! Those poor missionaries, and missionary moms, who were just arriving and alarms were going off and nobody could go inside the main building. I also didn't have my coat with me so I was rather cold. There has been a lot of goodbyes today and they have been really bitter-sweet. I am most definitely going to keep in touch with some of these missionaries.

My bus leaves the MTC at 3:30 in the morning and I still have stuff to pack. So that's all folks!