Week One is Done.

Like our good friends, the Hansen’s, this blog is written to our kids and grandkids and you are welcome to read it as well. But just know we will be referring to ourselves as mom and dad in here.

5 February 2023.

So what did we learn this week?

Our purpose is to...

"Invite others to come unto Christ by helping them receive the restored gospel through faith in Jesus Christ and His Atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end." 

That is the mission purpose. We dove right into the Preach My Gospel manual with Sister Port right after lunch (which of course included a glass... maybe it was two... of chocolate milk for Elder Phillips). We were in a district of 3 couples; us, the Thompsons from Pennsylvania and the Watsons from Alabama.

We had some other wonderful orientation meetings where we got to introduce ourselves like 4 different times, where we learned that we are not nearly as “long-winded” as we thought we were. I think our intro was among the bottom 10% in length. Whew! 

The next morning we met our morning class instructor, Brother Breneman. We learned that even though we are going to the Headquarters Mission and probably won’t be doing any proselytizing we were going to be given a crash course in learning and teaching discussions just like any other full time missionary in the Church. BTW we had to introduce ourselves again to Brother Breneman. 

We learned that afternoon that we had “Others”. I immediately thought of the spooky movie “The Others”. But our “Others” turned out to be just a single “Other”, Sister Amy Paul from India. We were supposed to take turns listening to each other to try to identify a need that we could prepare a lesson for to teach to her the next day. She spoke the whole time and we listened. Wow, what a life she has had. She joined the Church later in life after her mother joined the Church. The only other members of her family that joined the Church were two of her nieces who were raised by her and her mom. She is not married and she lived with and took care of her mom. After coming to the United States on a vacation she felt prompted that she should serve a mission. She went to her bishop to start the process, but a whole lot of things got in the way…a brother dying, her life being threatened by some random people and her papers getting held up in processing. Finally she was able to send them in and received her call to the Headquarters Mission. Shortly thereafter her mom had a stroke. She retired from work to stay home and take care of her mom and thought she was going to have to contact Salt Lake and let them know she wouldn’t be able to serve after all. But her mom passed away the first part of January and she was able to come to the MTC to start her mission with our group on January 30th. We have learned that our lives are pretty easy.

Mom learned that she can speak up when prompted by the Spirit and her thoughts come pretty quickly and easily…and make sense! She promised herself that she would speak if she felt she was being prompted to…and she did. 

We learned from the devotional Tuesday evening with Elder Kearon of the Seventy that we have been pronouncing missionary all wrong. He is from England and insists that it should be pronounced “mish-unry.” He kept repeating that throughout his talk. He and his wife both spoke and we learned that anxiety is different than fear. It’s not good to fear, but everyone is going to feel anxious…especially in the MTC when we are being bombarded with long days of study and worries about going somewhere we have never been before. We are definitely anxious about that last part, wondering what we will be doing on this mission. 

We learned they have some pretty cool artwork in the MTC. We got to go on a field trip to building T4 where they have some pretty cool murals. Here’s one of them. 

This is the sons of Mosiah going on their mission to the Lamanites. There are 12 of them total, 2 on each of the 6 floors of the building. We walked the stairs up and down all 6 floors to see them all. We got our stair-climbing workout in for the day! 

On Thursday night we had a devotional by the MTC President and his wife about “The Character of Christ”. They used a ton of clips from a talk that Elder David A. Bednar gave at the MTC a few years ago with that title. He main message of the talk was to quit thinking about what we think and want and learn to be more like the Savior by turning outward and focusing on what others need. Turn outward, not inward. That’s hard to do, but I know we can do it with the help of Savior. His grace makes it possible and that’s really why we’re here on earth anyway, to learn that we can truly turn outward like Him and be able to fully follow our Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness for us. 

Friday morning was one last class with Elder Breneman and then we headed up to Salt Lake. We learned that we would be staying in the West Temple Apartments and drove up there to meet Elder Winder who had a little welcome bag and our keys. He also had a shopping cart that somehow hangs around the apartment complex to help people move their belongings up to their apartment. We are on the 7th floor and our apartment is great. Mom kept saying, “This is so nice!”. I’m not sure what she was envisioning our apartment to look like, but apparently it wasn’t this nice. (It is nice)

We also learned where Walmart and Costco are. However, we only went to Walmart to get a bunch of stuff we needed for the kitchen and bed and bathroom and, and, and…and learned that we were pretty tired from a sort of non-stop week at the MTC. So we made the decision to go to Costco the next day and headed to Crown Burger to get one of their signature burgers that has a pile of pastrami on top. Yummm! We then learned that we need to check the schedule for the Jazz games because they were playing that night and we were driving right past the stadium and all the parking lots and fans walking all over the place?..pure chaos and major traffic. Ugh.

We learned the next day that they do their Costcos backwards here in Utah. At least the one that is closest to us. It is laid out totally flipped from all of the Costcos I have ever been to before and I kept turning the wrong way to do my normal shopping flow. It took us awhile to get out of there. 

We met some neighbors and helped get some tables and chairs for our break-the-fast that was going to be the next day. We have some pretty great people here in our building. One of the couples moved all of the furniture out of their living room into their hallway so the we could set up 3 long church tables and 30 chairs there instead. The next door apartment that is currently empty, but is assigned for mish-unry use was set up for everyone to bring their potluck items to set out to share. We had a great feast and of course got to introduce ourselves again. 

Be good!

Love you all

Mom and Dad