MTC #1

     I haven't ran into Zack because I am not in the spanish building :( I have ran into a lot of other people though! I ran into Elder Christensen and My cousin Rachael and a bunch of people from BYU-I so that has been really fun to see familiar faces.

     Well from the first moment I got into the MTC I felt so welcomed! Everyone was so nice and welcomed us. It was awesome. It is such a unique place here. So many smiling faces!!! (And everyone is dressed up and looking pretty snazzy). There is just a special feeling here and I love it! We immediately met our district and was assigned a companion for our stay at the MTC. My companion is Sister Allen and we get along just great :) She is a lot of fun but we both know how and when to focus in and study hard. We have 6 sisters and 4 Elders in our district! We have been told by many that this is a historical district because no one has ever seen more sisters then Elders in a district! We all love each other and have a lot of fun. We can be a little too talkative sometimes which can be frustrating when you are trying to study and learn. But I wouldn't trade them because everyone is so great! The sisters in my district are my roommates as well, 6 in a room. It can be crowded but we only sleep in the room. I go to the temple today on Pday. The food is fine. There are a good amount of options. I am feeling well and healthy except that I am waking up almost every morning with a head ache! :( Everything else is done in the class room. We have personal study time, companion study time, classroom time when a teacher comes in, and a time to teach investigators. So for a lot of the day we are by ourselves without supervison. So it really is up to us to get a good focused study time in. I love both of my teachers Brother Lewis (in the morning) and Brother Reddish (In the Afternoon). Class time with a teacher lasts 4 hours usually. It's a lot of sitting but we usually switch rooms and switch up the activities so it's not so bad. Your only break is eating which might only be 30- 50 minutes. In class we study preach my gospel and other materials. For instance yesterday we had a quick lesson on stress management or we will just read from the Book of Mormon and stop and discuss what we learned. Yesterday we learned about how to teach people not lessons. So first you greet people and get to know them, their beliefs, their background, thier relationship with God and other small talk. Then you tell them what your purpose is as a missionary which is to invite others to come unto Christ. You ask them what they expect to learn from us as missionaries and then you tell them what we as missionaries expect of them. (which is to help them make commitments to come closer to Christ) and you go from there.

     So! Let me tell you about teaching investigators. Our first progressing investigator was a teacher pretending to be an investigator,. You learn briefly about them and why they are open to talking to the missionaries. Then you go and teach them! After the lesson they evaluate how you did and give you some feedback. So our progressive investigator was Mike. We taught him that God was his loving Heavenly Father and that the Gospel of Jesus Christ would bring peace to his life. He had no previous belief in God so we taught him how to pray and invited him to pray to God and he said he would. After our lesson Mike evaluated us and was amazed that he was our first investigator. He told us "you don't teach like other missionaries but that is a good thing." We were so relieved! Our second lesson with him also went really well! We taught the restoration, the need for priesthood authority and prophets and then  committed him to read the Book of Mormon and baptism. (Yes baptism. We learned that you should try to commit people to baptism on the first visit). He said if he did find out for himself that what we were teaching was true he would be baptized. The third lesson (and last one) was so powerful! The spirit was so strong as we taught and bore our testimonies. That was such a special experience because we really felt like we were lead by the spirit in that lesson. It was an experience I won't forget.

     Sarah was our TRC. Members or Nonmember can get paid to be an "investigator" for an hour. You don't know if they are a member or not when you are teaching! I just wrote a letter to grandma about how that went so I will be brief. Our first lesson was really rough. We were all over the place, she had no belief in God and struggled to understand why it was even important. She had heard a lot of weird things about the church so our conversation was all over the place. At the very end she opened up to us about how her sister had cancer and it was terminal. Both sister Allen and I felt so bad and felt so much love for her. We really wanted to share a message of comfort with her but we had run out of time. We were so scared to teach her again. We had no idea how or what to teach her. But we studied, prepared and prayed that we would be guided. We had such a powerful experience. We had talked for quite a bit answering various questions. Finally she asked would it even make a difference if God lived? Would it even matter. I bore my testimony to her of God and the love he has for us. I told her of how i have felt God's love in my life. The spirit was so strong in the room. I asked her that if what I was saying was true, if God was our loving Heavenly Father, what would that mean to her? It was silent for a long time. Her answer was "I don't know... I just don't want to talk about God." But after another silence her real issue with God came out. Tears were flowing as she told us again about her younger sister and how she had cancer. Everyone was telling her that it was God's will for her sister. "How could God be so mean?" she asked. My companion then shared a personal story about how she lost her dad was she was 8. She and her family had always gone to church and had been good people. Why did it have to happen to her? Sister Allen realized she had to make a choice to be angry at God or to realize what she needed to learn from this. She said that God doesn't make bad things happen to people He allows bad things to happen so they can grow. She told Sarah how her family grew closer and that she grew closer to God. The she told Sarah that God is aware of what she is going through and that she loves her. When Sister Allen said this you could see that Sarah was really believing it and more tears came. It was such a powerful experience. we felt so amazing after! We won't have a chance to teach Sarah again. We won't even know if she was a member or not! But she was in reality going through a really hard time. I believe that her sister really does have cancer because she could not fake the emotions and very real concerns. I hope that we were able to help her feel God's love and to teach that there really is someone who is watching out for her and aware of her needs.

     Well I am out of time here. My laundry is almost done (finally I got to wash my clothes in an actual washer and dryer instead of in the shower! haha) This week we will continue to teach Fred who is our new investigator. I'm excited! Well I love you all so much!!!

Love,
         Sister Lounsbury