MTC Week 4 - Livin' on a Prayer

Oooohhh we're halfway there!

3 weeks down, 3 to go! This past week has been great. The days have been blurring together a bit, but I still have wonderful experiences every day. This Sunday, the MTC President, President Martino, was in our zone's Sacrament meeting and in my District meeting as well! He is from the south and is super cool. He brought some great comments and insight into our meeting and it was a really cool experience. I was a bit nervous being in charge of the meeting, but he made me feel good about it. He really is an awesome guy! Sunday's here are absolutely amazing and are some of the most spiritual days I have ever had.

Family Home Evening

This Monday was also a pretty good day! The solar eclipse, even though we weren't in the path of totality, was still really cool. I convinced my teacher to let us have our class outside which was great; the lighting was amazing! It was so eerie and strange; I had never experienced anything like it. I shared some solar viewing glasses with my district so they could all look too and we got some pretty good views of it. I hope I can see the next nearby eclipse in a few years! We also had a great "Family Home Evening" thing on Monday with the zone, and it was a really gorgeous place for a meeting. We talked about whatever we want, such as random scriptures or thoughts and it was a really spiritual meeting! I love the Elders and Sisters in my zone.

Our new roommates, Elder Marsh (left) & Elder Hable (right)

The two new Elders in our room, Elder Hable and Elder Marsh are really cool! We've been getting along super well and we hang out with them a lot. Elder Hable's family works for the state department, and spent a little less than the past year in Indonesia! He's also lived in the Washington DC area too, so we talk a lot about that stuff. Apparently, Sam Gustafson is one of his best childhood friends! What a small world!

Our teacher Sister Hunt ate dinner with us on Monday! (third one on right)

French is hard, but it's coming along so well. Our lessons continue to get better and better, and it’s absolutely insane to see how much we have improved. I know I keep saying it, but the gift of tongues is so real! It's hard to describe, but it's so awesome.

A little birthday decoration for President Monson.

 I'm really loving my time here, but I'm super excited to get out into the field. Our teacher, Sister Hunt, served in the Montreal mission, and she's made all of us super excited about it! I can't wait!

Sorry for the shorter email this week, the days are pretty much the same, but I hope I've talked about enough! love you all so much!

Love,

Elder James

MTC Week 3

Our District

Another short week has gone by, and I'm still enjoying my time here at the MTC! As I have been focusing on the language and my other studies, the time truly has been going by fast. It definitely doesn't seem like it, but it's been two and a half weeks already since I came into the MTC! I can't imagine how fast it's going to go when I am a few months in.

Decoration in our room

As per request of my mother, I will briefly go over my day-to-day schedule in case anyone is curious. Each morning, we wake up at 6:30, shower, get dressed, and plan for the day. At about 8:00, we go to breakfast at the cafeteria. The food actually is pretty good! They're pretty good at switching up the food, so I've only had about one or two repeat meals in the past two weeks. After breakfast, we either go to class from 8:30-11:30, or we have study time for the same amount of time. The classes are fun, and the teachers are great. It feels a lot like school, but instead of having a variety of classes, we spend almost all of the time exclusively working on French. Occasionally we will read the scriptures together, but that only lasts about 30 minutes. At study time, we are basically on our own to do what we need to do. We have to do an hour of personal study, companion study, and language study each, and so we usually space those out a little bit so we don't have too many times where we sit down for too long. After class or study time, we eat lunch, and then go right back to class from 1:30-4:30. Then after that, we have dinner, and then either go back to class from 6:00-9:00, or study for the rest of the day. So each day except for P-day and Sunday, we have 6 hours of classroom study. We also get exercise time, either at 11:20-12:20 or 6:20-7:20. Usually our district sticks together, and we work out and play basketball, volleyball, and four square (Which actually gets fairly intense and competitive sometimes; it is super fun). Then we are supposed to be in our residence by 9:30 and in bed with the lights out by 10:30. Having a set schedule and getting used to it really makes it easy to focus on our studies and the language and not have to get stressed about planning.

The Elders in our district at the Provo Temple this morning

 This week we had two apostles come in, Elder Ballard spoke on Sunday night and Elder Anderson spoke on Thursday. They were such great talks! Elder Anderson's talk particularly resonated with me, and it makes me so excited to learn to love and serve the people in Montreal. He spoke about missionary work in general and gave a few stories of missionaries and investigators that really made me excited to bring others unto Christ. It was super cool!

I'm now the assigned bodyguard for the Zone Leaders

Every night, the Elders in our zone gather together before bed time to sing Cantiques (French for Hymns) and mess around. We have what we call "artifacts" that are passed down from missionary to missionary, and each one has certain "blessings" and "curses" that are pretty funny. There is a "French Council" of 5 Elders, including the Zone Leaders, the two bodyguards to the ZL's, and the "Cantiques Master," which decide what gets to be an artifact and what rules are attributed to them.  On Sunday, I was chosen to be one of the two bodyguards to the ZL's, and I got a nerf gun that we have "executions" with if someone doesn't obey the rules of their artifact. It is honestly super ridiculous, but it's a ton of fun and we have lots of fun with it. On Monday, we had 7 of our 11 districts leave, which amounts to about 75 people. It was super sad because we really got close to them, but it's exciting that they're getting out to the field. On the night before everyone left, the whole zone gathered around the fountain (Which lights up and is gorgeous at night) and sang a Hymn that is only in French called "Souviens-toi" which is really pretty. It was super solemn and sad, but we're super excited for them.

The note we left the new Elders in our room, so they'd find it after we were gone!

 We've had a lot more lessons this week, and they've been getting increasingly better as time goes on. We now use no notes for our lessons, and are able to understand French very well, and are able to speak well enough to get our point across. Now that the language is becoming less of an issue, all we've been focusing on is the content of our lessons and keeping the doctrine simple. French is really hard, and my Spanish does conflict sometimes (I sometimes speak Spanish in my lessons which gets pretty comical), but It's crazy how much we've been able to learn.

It's been another great week here. I love my district, and we continue to get along well. Although I'm loving my time here, I'm getting more and more excited to get out in the field and serve the people in Montreal. Love you all, talk to you next week!

Love,

Elder James

MTC Week 2

My district at the temple this morning

It's been an amazing week this week! TONS of language study, and lots of lessons with our "investigator." We've been so stressed about our language studies, that we haven't been focusing on much else. We still have been doing some studying in the scriptures and Preach My Gospel, however, we've mostly been occupied with writing scripts for our lessons. As we've gotten more comfortable with the language, we have been able to do more of other things. Yesterday was our first lesson with out any notes, though, and it went really well! We, of course, aren't super comfortable with the language yet, and we spoke in super broken French, but we still were able to understand everything she asked and were able to answer her questions fully! The gift of tongues truly is a very real thing.

One of our favorite study spots

The language classes have been pretty difficult, but our teacher, Soeur Hunt, is great. She pushes us really hard and moves very fast, but it encourages us to learn very fast. It's crazy how much we've been able to learn in the short week we have been here. We have great study materials that are pretty good at teaching phrases, and after we get familiar with the phrases we are able to understand some of the grammar concepts and can then tweak phrases to say pretty much whatever we want (if we know the vocab) fairly easily. It's been such an amazing experience!

My first Sunday here was AMAZING. We had really great normal church meetings, but then we had a few interesting meetings and devotionals after the regular church stuff. Elder Bednar and his wife came to speak to us at the evening devotional! It was such an amazing experience and it was awesome to hear them speak. He was able to answer a few of the missionaries' questions, and he is so good at answering even the most complex doctrinal questions in simple terms so that everyone can understand. He really is such a smart and amazing man. On Tuesday we had another evening devotional, and Elder Satati (I think that's how you spell it) from the Quorum of the Seventy and his wife came to speak to us as well. It was such a great talk, and he was able to make us feel much more confident as missionaries.

My district

My district is getting really close and it is such a blessing. We all get along super well, and it's like having a second family which makes things much easier. We have been spending a lot of time together, and it's a very good thing that we're all friends. My companion and I are able to have tons of fun experiences, along with lots of spiritual experiences as well. He and I are really getting along.

Every P-Day, our zone goes to the Provo Temple early in the morning which is such a fun and amazing experience. I would have mentioned it last week, but I forgot to take pictures so I knew that my mom would get mad at me, had I mentioned it and not sent pictures. But I was better this time and remembered to bring my camera so we took a few.

Some of the Elders in my district with the Canadian flag

I can finally see why people often gain a lot of weight in the MTC... The food is actually really good, and you can eat basically as much as you want, and some Elders eat A TON. I've been able to restrain myself for the most part, and I exercise every day, but it is still very hard to control myself when I have an all-you-can-eat cereal bar.

A quote from "The Office" that I wrote down on the board and everyone
apparently loved - super applicable to teaching lessons!

Like my brother Andrew, I have been sleep walking and talking a lot recently, according to my roommates. Apparently, I stared out the window for like 15 minutes one night. I got up twice and turned the lights on to get ready at 1:00 and 3:00 AM another night, and I started going through my roommates' closets another night... I really need to figure out how to stop! Luckily they all just mess with me and think it's funny, so it's not a big deal. I just hope I stop waking them up all the time!

The cover for our next album

Anyway, I'm having such a fun time here. Everyone has been so great, and it's making the adjustment a whole lot easier. The spirit is so strong here and it has been such a great experience so far. Until next week! Bonjour!

Love,

Elder James