MTC Week 2: The Hallway Hermanas

Hola! 

Another P Day!  This week went by MUCH faster than last week. Spanish is starting to come along really well.  My companion has learned so much which is great because we have a new investigator to teach!  This teaching experience is going much better than the first. We’ve figured out how to better invite the Spirit to our lessons. It’s not by having every possible Spanish word and question and answer written down on a cheat sheet in our laps, it’s by being sincere and trusting in ourselves and in God to help us say what He wants us to.

Thanksgiving was amazing.  Elder Bednar came and spoke to us in the morning and he may be my new favorite apostle. I just love how direct and straightforward he is.  We watched a movie called Love, Kennedy in the afternoon.  It’s a little cheesy but has SUCH a good message so I suggest everyone watch it.  All of our elders were weeping by the end. Then we had a devotional with Sharon Eubank and the CEO of Feeding Children Everywhere and he has the most amazing conversion story I’ve ever heard!!  Always listen to the Spirit, guys. You never know what kind of impact you’ll have.  After the devotional we had a service project and we made over 350,000 meals!  It wasn’t Thanksgiving dinner at home, but it was definitely an amazing experience. 

Missionaries at Provo MTC prepare 350,000 meals

In other news, Hermana Lund and I have matching sweats now 🎉🎉🎉 best purchase EVER. The sisters in our residence have started to call us “The Hallway Hermanas” because every night when we get home we chill on the couches in the hallway in front of the vending machines and eat food and talk to everyone. It’s so fun to meet people from all over the world and hear about where they’re serving. Our particular favorites are a group of Polynesian sisters that like to do group singing.  It’s like our own mini concert because they’re AMAZING.  It’s funny to see people’s faces when I tell them I’m a Poly, too. 

Today we went to the temple and that was SO GREAT.  I feel pumped up for the rest of the week now.  But that’s also partially because all the new missionaries are coming in today. There weren’t any newbies last week because of Thanksgiving so my group has been the newbies until today. My roommates decorated the room next door for the new sisters coming in and we can’t wait to meet them! 👍🏻

Overall, this week has been one of progress.  I was sitting in our lesson with our investigator yesterday thinking about how crazy it is that Hermana Lund and I can have an actual conversation in Spanish now, and not only that, but we can teach the Restoration!  Granted, it’s rough and still marred with a bit of Spanglish, but I’m amazed at the progress we’ve made together and individually. The gift of tongues is real!!  

I’m learning that exact obedience and humility are ESSENTIAL in the MTC, and while I’m struggling with things I never thought I’d struggle with, I know that God is on my side. One thing my teacher told us on the first day here was that God called us to speak Spanish because He knows that we can do it.  But it’s not through ourselves or our intelligence or our willpower that will help us to learn, it’s through Him and His divine help. 

Speaking of which, if anyone’s up for a spiritual challenge, read three of President Monson’s most recent general conference talks...A Sacred Trust, Principles and Promises, and The Power of the Book of Mormon...and look for the common theme between all of them. 

Life. Changing. 

- Hermana Thunell

MTC Week 1: Accomplished

Hola! 

It feels like it’s been so much longer than a week.

I guess first things first: my companion is great.  Her name is Hermana Lund, she’s from Bountiful, and she’s 6’1” 😂😂  I really didn’t think I was that short, but it seems to be unanimously agreed on that I am the smallest one in the district.  Hermana Lund and I are seriously best friends. She’s loud and crazy and so fun!  We are the fun ones in the district and everyone says they appreciate our energy.  She and I are really close with the elders (there are 5 sisters and 5 elders total in our district) especially the district leader Elder Jensen and his companion Elder Stites. We share a room with the other sisters and we all get along for the most part.

So much has happened that I definitely can’t go day by day.  The language is so much harder than I thought it’d be and most of us are really struggling with it.  But the gift of tongues is real!  Yesterday we had our fourth lesson with our first investigator (who doesn’t speak ANY English) and Hermana Lund and I were able to commit him to be baptized! Hermana Lund has never taken ANY Spanish in school or anything, or any other language so it’s AMAZING how quickly she’s picking up on everything. She’s also received six packages since we’ve been here since her family lives so close 😂 they send her contraband Dr. Pepper and ramen and Mac and cheese. They’re also sending root beer for me in their next package ❤️😭😂

Sunday was really different.  We’re in a small Spanish branch that includes all of our floor and we split up into several classrooms to meet for Priesthood and Relief Society and then all come together in a chapel style classroom for sacrament meeting. We are all asked to prepare a three minute talk every week in Spanish because we don’t know who will be called on to speak until after the sacrament has been passed. After Sacrament meeting we split for teacher training, leadership training, or study time.  Hermana Lund and I are teaching Relief Society this coming Sunday so we had to go to teacher training.  After that we have lunch, then study time, and then a Match the Message meeting which apparently used to be called Dress and Grooming. They just talk about modesty in that meeting.  More study time after that, then dinner, and then a Sunday night devotional. The devotional was good, but after it we stayed and watched a “movie”, which was really just a recording of an Elder Bednar devotional from the past, and it CHANGED MY LIFE.  In it, Elder Bednar suggested getting a copy of the scriptures, writing a question in the front of it, and then marking every scripture that answers that question as you read.  He said the goal is to have shelves of copies of scriptures by the time you’re his age so you can look back on all the spiritual journeys you’ve taken. 

I’ve been having a little trouble feeling the Spirit here. Everyone always says this is the most spiritual place, but I’ve sort of just felt numb mostly and so I’ve been trying to find ways to invite the Spirit more. A member of my branch presidency challenged me to re-read the Book of Mormon, 4 chapters a day and I had just started that on Friday so I decided to use Elder Bednar’s idea and start from the beginning with the question of “How can I invite the Spirit into my life more?”  My studies have been so much more meaningful and I love looking back on the pages I’ve read and seeing them all marked up. I’ve been feeling the spirit all the time since then, especially yesterday in our Tuesday devotional.  Gifford Nielson came to speak and brought Janice Kapp Perry because we sang the EFY Medley and the choir sang a new song that she just wrote and it was her first time hearing anyone sing it. After we all sang the EFY Medley (which was the coolest thing ever, by the way) Elder Nielson invited her to comment on it.  She walked up to the microphone and said “I’d like you all to sing that at my funeral.”  She then proceeded to talk about how much she loved Elder Nielson when he was a football player for BYU.  She even pulled a football that he had signed out of her bag and tossed it to him as proof.  We were all cracking up and Elder Nielson turned to the MTC President and essentially said “She’s going rogue! What should we do?” And the MTC President just shrugged and let her keep talking. 😂😂

My fingers are getting tired of typing... 😂 

So today is P Day, of course, and the Temple will be closed after 10am. So as a district we decided to go before then. Well, some of the other missionaries and I have appointments about our immunization records at 9am, so to make sure we would make it, we all decided to go to the earliest Temple session. Our branch presidency told us that was a great idea and that the first session started at 5:30 in the morning and that a lot of the other districts had decided to do that, too. So we set our alarm for 4:30, woke up, bundled up, walked our cold, groggy group up to the temple in the dark, made it there by 5...and were told the first session didn’t start until 7. Some of us did not find as much humor in that as others 😂 my fingers are still trying to thaw, but it’s all good. Those of us with appointments headed back to the MTC while those without stayed behind to ponder in the temple for a while and then head in for the session. 

The food is hit or miss here. Hermana Lund hates it but she has Mac and cheese and ramen in our room so we still manage to feed her. 😂

We always take the stairs to our classroom so that we don’t gain the MTC weight everyone talks about. We’re on the top floor. And we are currently in the process of getting matching MTC sweats so everyone knows who I belong to while I watch her kill it at basketball during exercise time. 👍🏻😂😊 

That’s pretty much the highlights.  I’ve seen a few people I know from home and from Allen, so that’s fun and it’s so easy to make friends here. Some days are hard but I’m having a great time. 

Yo sé que Dios es conmigo y que Él me ama. Estoy agradecida por mi compañera y por esta opportunidad yo tengo compartir el Evangelio y yo sé que es verdadero. 

❤️ Hermana Thunell