20 April 2018 - Friday

20 April 2018 - Friday

It is officially the end of the first week here at the MTC!  We have had a marvelous experience getting to know senior missionaries assigned all over the world.  Some were leaving today for various destinations here in the United States and those going overseas are leaving next week when we do.  On Monday we will begin a two day training session on the Visitor and Historic Sites.  Then mom and I plan to leave early Wednesday morning for Wyoming.  It will be about a five hour drive and we have one of the senior missionaries there who will meet us at the Missionary Village where our trailer is located.

We have been involved in a variety of activities!  The meals we have shared with so many different senior couples have been fun to get better acquainted.  Even doing our laundry last night as all the other missionaries were eating dinner gave us a peaceful time together.  As we were about finished with our laundry we got to talk to the senior couple going to Nauvoo as FM Missionaries.  We got to relieve their minds about what to expect from working in the FM department, and we got to send our greetings to those full time workers at Nauvoo that we got to work with!

Then, guess what?  I was able to download some pictures tonight!  Somehow with a regular Samsung update, my pictures all became available to download!!  Yea!!  I will give more detail about each picture;

These are our wonderful friends, the Bates

District members, Lllewellyn's, us, Sister Barlow (trainer), Teuscher's, Kizerian's (DL) 

Our closing meeting for PMG this afternoon

And this is our goal!!

Beautiful spring temple flowers!

The Provo Temple after the 4pm session today

Lesson in selfies... SMILE!

We were able to walk to the Provo Temple again and attended the 4:00pm session.  This will probably be our last time in the "indoor" temples!  The next six months we will cherish the experiences of the "Outdoor" temple in and around Martin's Cove, Sixth Crossing and Rock Creek. 

These memories and experiences are precious and are excellent motivators to be the best missionaries we can be.  We spent a lot of time in our district meetings getting to know each other and felt a real closeness.  With Elder and Sister Bates, we spent some really focused time in teaching by the Spirit and this was especially rewarding for us.  They are the ones we had the teaching experience concerning their gay son.

Now are you ready for "the rest of the story"??  Today we all had a member of the community in a teaching session where we got to know them for 15 minutes,  then we had 10 minutes to prepare a Gospel message tailored to that person and then 20 minutes to deliver that lesson.  Mom and I had a sweet experience working with a sister that had been abused and was taking steps to overcome those wounds.  Mom was awesome in identifying and reaching out to her with the information we gathered.

But probably the rest of the story we had to share here is that the Bates were able to peel away some sensitive layers from a young man's same sex attractions and were able to use what we had shared yesterday along with their personal experiences.  Now none of us knew anything about those we met beforehand.  It was the Spirit working through us to be connected to them.  It was a very sweet experience.