Morning Devotional. We're all sitting down, singing our prelude, when they announce that the speaker coming is David A. Bednar! There were lots of gasps, and I'm pretty sure a sister in front of me started crying. Basically every missionary is emotionally unstable, so any sort of surprise throws them over the edge. Anyway, the devotional had a very unique format. Elder Bednar's team passed out 150 cell phones around the auditorium, and then put a text number up on the screen for the missionaries to text in questions. So we had a cool Q&A type of devotional. The main messages that I took away were A) I'm probably going to change a lot because of my mission, and it's important that I embrace and love the person that the Lord will mold me into. I've already felt myself change so much even after 6 weeks, and I'm excited to see what changes are coming! and B) Book of Mormon Book of Mormon Book of Mormon. I need to read it more. And I need to study it to find answers to my questions. Elder Bednar suggested that for every question, we get a cheap copy of the Book of Mormon and read it with just that question in mind. Then once you're done, write a page summary of what you've learned, label the side of the book, and put it on a shelf and start collecting little specialized Book of Mormons for every question.
So after Elder Bednar spoke we had our Turkey Dinner (at lunch time). The pumpkin pie wasn't as good as yours, Grandma, but the turkey wasn't as bad as I expected it to be.
Then we watched the movie "Love, Kennedy" Here's the deal. I would only recommend this movie if you are currently in one of the following categories.
1. You have something stuck in your eye that you need to flush out.
2. You're trying to win a "most tears cried in 90 minutes" award.
3. You've never cried in your life and you're curious about what that might feel like.
If you don't fall under one of those categories, save yourself from the dehydration. I cried, like a scary noisy type of cry, through the whole movie. And if you think that maybe I'm just a baby, think again: the entire row of very manly looking elders sitting behind us were crying harder than I was.
We finished off the night on a better note though. The Nashville Tribute Band was invited to come perform for our evening devotional. For those of you who haven't heard of them, think Southern Redneck Mormon Music, and whatever image comes to your head is probably accurate. I'll just sum up their performance by saying that during one song, every missionary was standing up clapping along, and many were shouting out things like "hallelujah" and "yee haw". It was a lot of fun, which is probably why we got an email this morning from the Mission Presidency saying how disappointed they were in some of the bands music choices. I will say that they played several songs that were beautiful and the message they left us with was very uplifting, so va bene.
Some other highlights of this week:
- While acting like an investigator, Anziano Elliot was trying to tell me that "If you read that Book of Mormon, you will become closer to Jesus" except he forgot the Italian words for 'closer to' so he just left them out. Needless to say, he left this investigator with a some very strange ideas about the Mormon Church.
- They decorated the whole MTC with Christmas lights!!! It's so fun. Like a slightly less exciting Temple Square.
- I accompanied two musical pieces this week: One cute Sister headed to Hong Kong, and two Elders going to Arizona and California. The sister's performance went flawlessly, and the Elders' didn't have their lyrics memorized until two minutes before their performance time...
- I learned that it is grammatically correct to add emphasis to words using as many prefixes and suffixes as you want. so my new favorite word is supervelocissimamente , which translates to super very fastly.
My final spiritual thought this week comes from an interesting talk we had with the MTC Executive Secretary. He was telling us about the story of Ammon, but proposed that Ammon was more of a member missionary than a missionary missionary. We talked about the story from that perspective, and it was so interesting. He didn't go to the Lamanites and immediately begin preaching, he just served them. And by serving them, he slowly took down the walls around their spirits that were preventing them from listening to the spirit. So for all you member missionaries at home, remember that you're Ammon! Just by serving people, you open up their hearts so they can let the gospel in! I invite you all to go back and read that story and think about ways that as a member missionary, you can be like Ammon.
I love you all so much, and next time you'll be hearing from me, I'LL BE WRITING FROM ITALIA !!
Vi voglio un sacco di bene,
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