Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Nearing the End (of the MTC that is!)


September 1, 2012
Hello Family!  It has been so great reading all of your emails and hearing all about your lives!  It seems like Jace has been the center of attention for the past week!  I can´t believe that he is already a month old!  It seems like just yesterday I got a letter with a picture of him saying that I am an uncle!  Crazy how time flies!  
Speaking of which, I´m out of here in a week and a half.  I am pretty sure we leave on Sept. 11, but I´m not 100% sure, so we will see!  Things here have kind of been slowing down.  We have gotten into a routine full of study, teaching, learning, and such.  It can get a bit boring at times, because we are in the same classroom for the greater part of the day, but when I step back and look at the bigger picture, I realize that it isn´t boring at all, because it is the most important thing that I can be doing at this point in my life!  I really need to be ready once I go out into the field, so all this study time is a great thing for me!  
Nothing big has really happened this week, just the usual:  going to the temple, p-day, and a whole lot of studying! Those are basically the highlights of this week!  We have been continuing teaching our two investigators, who are our teachers, and I feel like we have been doing really well!  Elder Welker and I have been told by both of our teachers that we have really good unity together, and that we can really work well to deliver the message together.  I´m glad they have said that, because I feel so far behind on my Spanish compared to him.  I haven´t taken a Spanish class since Jr. High, and he took Spanish classes all the way from 9th grade up until he came here, so all the way through college.  So he is definitely ahead of me in Spanish, and I sometimes look for help with the language from him, but I feel like I am holding my own and am actually doing really well!  Not only have I been studying the language, I really have studied more about the doctrine than I ever have.  
I don´t know if I told you, but I finished the Book of Mormon for the first time all by myself here.  It really was so cool to read it because I wanted to!  Now I am reading dad´s favorite, Jesus the Christ, and I am so mad at myself for not picking up this book earlier!  I have learned so much about Christ and his ministry.  I really feel like I get closer and closer to him every day!  I have also been studying a lot out of preach my gospel too.  There are so many useful things in there, even if you aren’t a missionary!  I love reading so much about what I am really here for, and it really helps raise my spirits.  Like I said, not much has happened here this week, but next week will be a lot different.  Next week we go proselyting again, but this time without a Latino companion, so it will just be me and Elder Welker going out into the real world.  I´m definitely still nervous, but I feel a whole lot better going out this time then I did 3 weeks ago.  I feel like I know what I am doing (sort of) and feel really confident to share my testimony with others!  
On a funnier note, some crazy things have happened in our district this week.  Really funny, but crazy.  So us as a district are really close, so we joke around a lot and aren't really afraid to be ourselves.  So on Wednesday, the whole day was pretty much studying and more studying.  One of the Elders in our district, Elder Oveson, doesn´t really do well with studying for such a long period of time, so when we got to around 7 at night, we were all pretty much worn out, especially him.  We were talking and joking around about how we could get rid of our stress.  Elder Oveson just out of the blue said jokingly that he wanted to flip a table over with all the stuff on it and clean up the resulting mess.  Or we thought he was joking...  We all were telling him to do it, because we didn´t really think that he would.  But wouldn´t you know, one thing leads to another, and a table is flipped over with a huge mess all around it.  We were all laughing so hard and couldn´t really believe that he did it!  It sure was a great laugh and great to relieve some of our stress.  Plus the table he flipped over had a chance to be organized, so it was a win win!  
Haha but I really am having a blast here and I love everything about it here!  I can´t wait to go out into the field and such, but I still have a lot to learn!  I love this work and I love the gospel, and I wouldn´t rather be doing anything else here at this point in my life!  Thank you all for your support and love, and I´ll be back next week!!!  
I LOVE YOU ALL!!!!  
Elder Stuart

No comments:

Post a Comment