Dear Family,
Thank you all for the much love, support, and prayers I feel from all of you. It really does make a difference. I want to tell you all about so many amazing and awesome experiences I've had, and I will, but I know all of you want to know more about the MTC life and how things are at the West Campus:
There are two apartment complexes that are part of West Campus, RainTree and Wyview. My room, the chapel, the store, and gym are at Wyview, while we spend the majority of our days at RainTree which has our class rooms and the cafateria. I usually eat a bagel with jelly and maybe a doughnut for breakfast. I think Amy's kids wanted to know what cereal choices there were: Frootloops, lucky charms, honey nut cherios, and golden grams. Breakfasts aren't my favorite because almost all of the options are really sugary but I like the whole-wheat (I think) bagels and jelley.
Anyways, we spend lots of time learning the language and learning how to better help people's relationship with Jesus Christ and God. I've learned a ton about being a missionary and just about helping people in general. Being a missionary has almost nothing to do with how well you can teach and everything to do with focusing on the investigator and their relationship with their Savior.
The language is definitely hard. I think learning any language would be hard, but the work is going well and I, along with my district, are continually getting better and better. I really love the Hungarian language though. There is tons of stuff to learn about it and the grammar is fun, but it makes so much sense to me. It's a very, very smart and efficient language and although I can barely speak it, I really love it. I think the hardest part for me is just memorizing all of the words, but that will come with time. Right now me and my companion are a bit behind in the language I think, but that is okay because we've been focusing on other, more important thing. I have faith that by the time we leave the MTC our language skills will be ready.
This last Monday we taught our first lesson in Hungarian. We've given two now and I've definitely learned a ton just since the first one. We gave a couple lessons in English before the Hungarian ones. My district is only the second (I think) district to be test running a new learning schedule for language learners. To my understanding, the normal learning schedule has language learners teaching lessons in their Mission language after only a few days and not teaching many (if any) lessons in English. This new schedule we are trying out has us teaching a fair amount of lessons in English first, so that we learn good teaching skills and then teaching the first misison language lesson about a week after the normal schedule. Our teachers are awesome. Really just incredible people, Grossen Tesver (Brother Grossen), Szuboda Neuver (Sister Szuboda), and Boamont Tesver. I think the fact that they are testing the new schedule shows how incredible they are. Great examples for all of us.
A few neat things: On June 23 there will be a Church general public broadcast about missionary work. This will be held in the Mariot center and all of the missionaries from both campuses will be there. I believe it is going to be broadcast to church building for the public to view (my understanding is that a letter was read about this to all of the wards). Additionally, the missionary chior will be performing two pieces along with some local church members in a combined chior. Unless something happens, right now I will be in the chior that is performing for this!
Now I will take a few minutes to write about the something more important than anything else I've written about. Prayer. Prayer has been something amazing to be over my stay here at the MTC. I have had multiple truly miraculous experiences. In addion to these couple of amazing experiences, pray in general just has been seeming so much more true to me, and I already had a testimony of it before I came on my misison. I truly have a testimony of prayer. When we pray, God does hear us. God loves us and has blessed us with prayer. He knows our struggles, he knows our weaknesses and he loves us. As we go to him in prayer he answers us. I know this, and I know as you all go to God in Prayer through Christ, he will answer your prayers.
I love you all so much,
Shoop Elder
No comments:
Post a Comment