MTC: Making The Change.

Jo Napot! (Good Afternoon)

Two weeks down, seven to go! It's not like I'm counting the exact number of days (forty-nine) until I get out of the MTC and get to embark on my wonderful journey to the beautiful country of Hungary. But seriously, I really love it here. Everyone is super friendly and nice and helpful so it makes the stay here very easy. 

Let's see, what happened this week? Well my companion and I taught our last lesson to our first investigator at the end of last week. We felt like we did pretty good, and that Peter (Brother Beaumont) understood us fairly well. This week we have had to teach two investigators (Other two teacher-- Grossen and Hardy). The only difference is is that these lessons, instead of being five minutes each, they have to be thirty. Which is a lot harder than five. We taught our first one to Adam (Grossen) earlier this week and it didn't go as well as planned. We went into the lesson confident and come out very frustrated and disappointed, but I know that this is preparing us for the field. Not all lessons will go as you want, and we will face disappointments out in the field, so we mise well get used to it. We have our second thirty minute lesson this evening with Monika (Hardy). We'll see how this one goes, hopefully better than Adam's.

Tomorrow we have to go teach a lesson at the Teaching Resource Center (TRC). In which we will talk to an "investigator" that isn't one of our teacher (they usually pull an RM from BYU that served their mission in Hungary). We're excited, and hope that we can bring the spirit into our message, to make up for our broken "Hunglish," As we call it. 

One of the things I really love about this gospel is that it remains consistent, and the doctrine doesn't change, no matter where you go. I see this a lot, with having five different languages in our branch. Every Sacrament meeting, we are expected to pray, speak and sing in our mission language. It sounds so cool to hear everyone in their mission language, even though you don't exactly know what they're saying, you can definitely still feel the spirit as strong, if not stronger if you were all talking in English. This past Sunday, was the Albanians last Sunday with us, they left on Tuesday Morning, but before they left Sacrament meeting on Sunday they all sang "God be with you 'till we meet again." The spirit was so strong as I sat there, my eyes welled with tears thinking about how we don't know how life is going to turn out, but if we remain strong and faithful in the gospel, we will eventually all meet again. Whether it be in this life or the next. It was amazing!
Okay, so like I mentioned before, the devotionals here are awesome! But the one we had last Sunday will be hard to beat, in my book. We got the privilege to hear Robert Elliot, who is the organ player for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, speak about his conversion to the church and all the wonderful experiences he's experienced since his conversion. He had a few mission stories to tell and then we played the organ the rest of the time! The most impressive thing about his organ playing (there were a lot of impressive things), but at one time he injured his hand and couldn't play the organ, so what did he do? He learned how to play, "Go tell them on the Mountain" just with his feet! It was so incredible! I felt a little inferior, seeing how I can't even play the organ, let alone the piano, with my hands! Following Brother Elliot, we go to listen to David Archuleta! Live! Yes! David Archuleta came and spoke to us, and blessed us with his amazing voice. For those of you who don't know who David Archuleta is, I strongly recommend to look him up! He's very popular around the word. He just got done serving his mission in Chile, speaking Spanish, and it was funny because he was struggling the whole time to speak English. 

Sunday night we always are scheduled to watch a movie. Hawks Nover and I decided to go to the "Character of Christ," by David A Bednar! If you can, I would go to lds.org and look up that devotional. It's so amazing! I would really like to hear what some of you think of it. It would suffice for me, if you just watched it! It's a powerful message that really makes you think about Christ's Character compared to the natural man's character. If you do happen to watch it, let me know what you think!

Anyways, That's about it for this week. Weeks 2-8 are the same--classes, eat, classes, eat, gym, classes, etc. It's not until the last week that we change anything in our schedule. 

I"m sorry if my posts start to seem repetitive, I'll try to spice things up for you a bit, so you don't hear the same thing over and over again

Again, I would love to hear from all of you. My mom gave me some names and addresses of some people, and I'll try to get some letters out this week! I love you so much!

"Doubt your doubts, before you doubt your faith."

and

God be with you 'til we speak again!

Nover Whitaker