Well, week 2 flew by so fast.
Week 1 took so long. But now it's as they say, every day is a week, and every week is a day. Things that happened on monday feel like forever ago, and thinking that Monday was 3 full days ago is ridiculous.
Our devotionals this week weren't nearly as cool as last week. Our Sunday speaker was the facilities manager here, and his talk seemed really rushed and last minute. On Tuesday Elder Grow of the 70 spoke. His talk was pretty good. He spoke a lot on his time as a mission president. I fell asleep for most of it though cuz the room was really warm and some cranky old guy wouldn't let us take our suit coats off. Speaking of cranky old guys, they seem to employ a lot of them here. Last Friday, an elder in my district, Elder Ostler, stuffed some napkins in my cup. When I went to put my tray on the conveyor belt for the kitchen staff to clean, some other cranky old guy started yelling at me. He was yelling stuff like "What do you think you're doing?! Why would you do something like that?!! No representative of Jesus Christ would ever try to pull a stunt like that!!!" There is also a cranky old guy that sometimes monitors the doors of the cafeteria, watching to see if someone tries to take food out of the cafeteria. There is a really obscure sign placed in the middle of the doors that no one looks at that says "No taking food out of the cafeteria." He has yelled at so many people, who then proceed to stuff whatever food they had in their hands in their mouths before he can grab it out of your hand. This morning, an elder from Japan who didn't speak English, was getting yelled at, but he didn't know that he was getting yelled at, or what the sign said. So the cranky old guy barreled through the crowd to get to him, and ripped the banana out of the elder's hand and yelled at him while waving it in his face. Haha these cranky old guys crack me up
We finally got our TRC investigator to commit to baptism. TRC is a training program that is designed to help missionaries prepare for the field. Our investigator, Hely, is from Guatemala. She is pretty old, I think in her sixties or so, and really short. Like maybe 5 foot nothing, if you round up. Every single lesson, we've had the spirit super strong, so I have invited her to be baptized. And every single time she had said something along the lines of "This is a really big step in my life, and I'll have to pray about it." Every single time. But yesterday, while my comp was talking, I felt the prompting that she would say yes if he invited her right then and there. So I said "Quiere invitarle?" "Do you want to invite her?" so he did. And after some brief persuasion, she said she would be baptized, but would need to talk to her husband about a date. The Spirit was pretty powerful. This week, we also started teaching members. That is so much harder than teaching investigators because we only know Spanish things to say to investigators. Members already know, and are harder to teach because the words are less basic that you use.
Anyways, my testimony is growing so much stronger here, in ways I didn't even know they could. On the first day, a Sister going to Tahiti that had been here for 10 weeks bore her testimony to us on how the MTC has changed her life and how much she loves the food and that we shouldn't believe any negative things anyone tells us about the food. We all made fun of her later on, not to her face, but just joking around in the residence hall. Now I realized how right she was. Not about the food, but about the fact that it changes lives. My testimony has grown so much here, because it has forced me to focus on other people besides myself. "My Purpose" that we always recited in mission prep has so much more meaning now that I am here, than it did when we would recite it every week in mission prep. It goes "My Purpose as a missionary 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 really is central to this whole deal, not just to missionary work, but to the Gospel and Church as a whole. I had thought it was just something to keep at the back of your mind, like the pledge of allegiance. But this is really something to focus on. It's legit.
I bear my testimony that this church is true, and that Joseph Smith really did see our eternal father, and his son, Jesus Christ as a 14 year old boy. We read the first 20 verses in JSH the other day in class and the Spirit bore really powerful witness that the events described really were true, and really did happen. I say that in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Love,
Elder Brown
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