Ocho Semanas Sin Un Carro

Whattup whattup whattup! 

So it turns out that our whole zone's schedule got changed for some reason which makes our P-Days on Thursday and a whole bunch of other stuff, but as far as District 23-B is concerned we only have 11 more days left!!! So the exciting news for the week...Flight Plans!!! I thought it was way funny getting that letter from Hunter about his flight plans home and tonight we'll find out for sure when I'm cruising out del CCM!!! 

We also got to be "Hosts" for the new missionaries this week and it made me think about when I reported. but it was way fun to welcome all the new Elders and Sisters and get them comfortable here. The crazy part was that out of the 400 new missionaries reporting about 130 of them were Sisters! Its crazy to see how much more involved the Sisters are getting in missionary work and is totally awesome to know that they made this choice without even being expected to! So to all the Young Womens leaders out there...way to go!!! 

One of my favorite parts of this week was for sure our Devotional. This last Tuesday we got the opportunity to hear from Elder Russell M. Nelson. So in the 8 weeks I've been here we've heard from a third of the Quorom of the Twelve! The cool part about hearing from him is the fact that he is the Apostle that is the acting President of Missionary Work and instead of using teleprompters or having a written speech, he got up with his scriptures and spoke to us for about 40 minutes or so. Out of all the Apostles we heard from, his talk was definately my favorite because of the message he shared with us about "The Doctrine." I could seriously go on for hours about what he said, but what I figured I would share with you guys is something that became crystal clear for me early on in the MTC when it was a little more cloudy than it should have been in my teenage years. 

I remember one of the first weeks we learned about the "Doctrine Pyramid" and how to explain Doctrine to our Investigators. In Preach My Gospel, President Boyd K. Packer is quoted saying, "Teaching Doctrine changes behavior better than teaching behavior changes behavior." What we learned was that at the foundation of the pyramid was the "Doctrine" or "why" we do what we do. In the middle was the "Principle" or the "what". At the top and smallest part is the "Application" or the "how". As a teenager I have seen the "Application" part take the role in our minds as the "Doctrine", and have seen here that it is crucial that everyone understands the difference.  I remember many times when people would say "Is it true that you guys can't watch R rated movies" or "is it true that you guys can't drink caffeine" or "is it true that you guys can't do anything on Sunday." I would say yes to all those things and when they ask why, we normally give the answer "because our Prophet said so" or "because it's good for us", which is a dead giveaway that most of the youth only see what they "can't do" instead of the blessings of their actions. I know that what I'm saying is probably not super clear so I figured I would put it in an analogy that made it all of the sudden make sense to me. Trying to convert people to the Church is like trying to get someone who has no knowledge about school, to go to school. Too many times we get caught saying, "Well what you are supposed to do is wake up at 7 every morning for 5 days a week at about 9 months out of the year. It normally lasts for about 7 hours a day and on top of that, you get work to do at home once you are finished. We take tests and if you don't do well on them, you have to do everything over again. If you do good on them, it feels awesome and we get to do even more school at a higher level." If that is your pitch and is all that people will know about school, do you think we are going to be able to get them to go? That conversation will turn into an awfully short street contact. If you tell them that it is a way to gain knowledge which will eventually lead to more fully qualifying you for a job which will be a way for you to provide for your family, your crowd will be a little more interested. 

I feel like in our church, we as members talk too much about what we do and feel like we need to more fully understand the "why". I remember seeing everything start to click in our Investigators mind when we were explaining the commandment of "Dia de Reposo" of "Keep the Sabbath Day Holy." If I were to have taught this when I was 15, I would have said it is a day where "we don't do things we would have done any other day to show our respect for the Lord and use it as a day to remember him." When we explained it to our investigator, we started off by talking with her about how busy our lives are and all of the distractions that we have. We shared Heleman 5:30 with her...a verse that explained the still small voice that the Spirit speaks in. She came to the conclusion that her life was, to say the least, a little hectic and it was difficult for her to hear the spirit. Then we followed with explaining the law of Keeping the Sabbath Day Holy and how as we set aside daily activities and distractions, we are given an opportunity to feel the Spirit and have it help us in our lives. So the point that I am trying to get across is that when we share the gospel with others, we need to explain the Doctrine, Principle, and then Application instead of the Application, Principle, and then Doctrine. I feel like this is such an import lesson that became crystal clear to me here and I hope that others will learn from it, especially the youth in preparation for thier missions and opportunities to share what we believe in their constantly social atmosphere. I sure do miss you guys but I'm way stoked to be out here especially at this time where I'm almost leaving out to the field!!! 

 

Les Quiero Mucho!!!

Elder Justin Wilson

 

Dallas or Bust!!!

Semana Siete

Well it's almost here!!! Next week we get our flight plans and will find out when we cruise on out of the MTC!!! This week has been way good, totally crazy but way good. I haven't run into Dylan or Cody yet but I did see Danny and it was so awesome!! I felt like Alma when he ran into the sons of Mosiah and was so pumped to see one of my best friends in the mission field! But yes, our beloved teacher Hermano Miller is gone. We got a new teacher who we thought was wierder than a three dollar bill at first but when we got to know him more we grew to love him and he's such an awesome guy! Since all of our teachers here go to BYU they were all complaining about finals and it made me think about how just a year ago I was cruising down from Provo and getting ready to party it up in Canyon Country! And then that made me think about how I came up to the Spring Sememster (such great memories and so glad you guys got me to do that) and just thought it was crazy that I'm living in the same place but my schedule is pretty different (I could probably count on one hand the number of times I got to bed at 10:30 last year.) 

But about the MTC, the last fireside that we had, me and Elder Johansson got pulled out of the crowd to be Ushers and when the director was giving us instructions he said, "You guys are going to be pretty lucky to get the Usher seats because we have something special planned for tonight." Not thinking anything of it, (because they say that every Sunday), we just went and did as we were told. So as we were going about our "priestly duties" and making sure all the chairs were full, we just saw everyone stand up and I turned around to see Elder M. Russell Ballard come in! It was awesome because our seats were probably the fourth row (out of hundreds!) back so we definitely got hooked up! 

So much has happened in this past week but my favorite part by far was TRC. TRC was something that we started our second week into the MTC and is a program where people that can speak the language that you are learning come in and you simply teach them a lesson. It is normally members that have served a mission and want to brush up on thier Spanish, but it can be anyone. The way it goes is that you normally teach two members 20 minute lessons each and call it a day, but today was the first day where we were going to teach a 40 minute lesson at TRC. For the past 5 weeks we have all had members to teach and what we were going off of was teaching 10 members in the past 5 weeks, so naturally, we prepared a lesson that was formulated to a member. The first out of place thing was that our teacher thought TRC was going to be at 3 and the TRC guy came and grabbed us out of our class at 1:30, which docked a significant amount of time that we were going to use to mold our lesson, so we were going in to teach a 40 minute lesson with just an idea of what we wanted to talk about. Another red flag that popped up was the fact that the door of the room we were supposed to teach was closed (which was odd because every time before, the door is open and you just walk on in.) So we thought nothing of it and knocked on the door and just like normal, a person we didn't know opened it. With no background, we gave our introduction and told him that we wanted to share a message with him about invovling members in missionary work (and remember this was all done in Spanish.) He had a somewhat confused look on his face but said, "sure come on in." So every person we had taught had served a mission so as we were getting to know him we asked him if he served a mission and he answered, "No." I have no idea what prompted this next question but we asked him (Nicholas) if he was a member and he said, "No." Me and Elder J just felt blind sided and were shocked at what was happening but in the back of our minds we thought, "even though he is latino, it's always a member so he's probably just playing off some role." So we got know him a little bit more, found out he was from Buenos Aires, Argentina, was just living in Provo with some of his friends and working, and we then found out that he knew nothing about the church. So Elder J looked at me with "first day in the MTC" wide eyes and I just jumped into the first lesson. It was so crazy how we were able to just bust out the first lesson on the spot, without having prepared anything special, and relating it to him. Some things that we were doing we had never thought to do before and as I look back, I saw just how much the six weeks of training were starting to help us. We still thought that he was a member acting as a nonmember, but we still went through explaining everything to him with the thought that he knew nothing about the Gospel. Even though it was far from perfect, I can't say that I wasn't impressed that we were able to pull it off with the circumstances we were under. 

What normally happens at the end of the first lesson is we challenge people to pray to know if the Book of Mormon is true after reading and pondering about it, but we started relating the principles that we taught to some of the problems that he was having in his life and for some reason, I just felt like inviting him to church. So I extended the invitation and after thinking about it for a minute, he went through his work schedule, looked up at us and said that he'd love to come. We thought that there was no way that he would say no, but still acted super excited that he accepted and closed talking about how it would bless his life and had him offer the closing prayer (which surprisingly to us, he needed help with.) So we ended with some friendly conversation, gave an "Hasta Domingo" and we were out. Still totally in shock that we had to teach the first lesson, we went to our class and told our district about how everything happened and a couple minutes later, our teacher came in and asked us if we knew that Nicholas was from Argentina. We told him yes and he said, "well I talked to him after the interview and he said that he came up to Provo with one of his friends from Brazil who got him to come to TRC. He then said that after meeting with you guys he thought that he wanted to go to our church this Sunday." He told us a little bit more background information on Nicholas and said, "Do you guys realize you just taught an investigator?" It was at that moment that I felt better than I can ever remember! I looked back on all of my life experiences and tried to find a moment where I felt close to what I felt that day. Getting into BYU, Jimmer draining threes, family reunions, all of these experiences I was trying to compare to and nothing came close. I wanted so badly to follow up and see if he was really going to come and felt more excitement and joy than I ever had before! I'm trying so hard to explain what I felt, but words just wont do it any justice. We all confirmed that there was a slight possibility that he was a member, but more likely than not, we just taught the first lesson to a real investigator. It was a taste of what it's going to be like in the field and I LOVED it!!! As I looked back and thought about how we were able to do what we had done, I thought about a quote by Elder Bednar where he said, "For some reason, the culture of the church thinks that the spirit works through overwhelming spiritual impressions and gives amazing spiritual experiences. What everyone needs to understand is that when we obey the commandments and the covenants we have made, we will be guided by the spirit to do things and have no idea why we are doing them. Most of the time, we will have no idea that we are working through the spirit." We were definitely guided by the Spirit without having any idea what we were doing, and it was one of the greatest experiences I've had yet!  Well I could talk about so much more but we are only given so much email time. Love you all and I can't wait to share more experiences! 

 

Les Quiero mucho!

Elder Justin Wilson

Semana Seis!!!!!!

First off I would like to say that was awesome getting my "Google Translate" letter from Brett! Before you guys google translate my response, I want mom to try and get it....you guys can test her Espanol haha! Wow this week flew by and I have so much to talk about and so little time...but I wanted to thank you guys so much for my Easter package!! Totally thought the April fools one was for real so I guess you can give Brett and Shane (who I figured were the masterminds) all the credit! I also got the costco envelope stolen out of it from Elder Keck and we had a huge chase about it because he thought pictures of Rachel were in it! As you all know I'm pretty slow, but when it comes down to other dudes interested in my sister, it was like my version of Popeye's Spinach and I just took off! I had never run so fast in my life! But finally, I caught up to him, and was able to successfully get the photo package back to find the St. Patricks picture of Shane haha. 

One of the best parts of the week was when we got to hear from President Packer for our Easter Morning devotional! It was so awesome because I was literally 10 steps away from him and could just feel his power! We were so close that it was a little daunting when he would look out into the crowd and it looks like he makes eye contact with you...just staring into your soul! It was like he showed up, stared everyone down to understand what we all needed, and gave an amazing talk personalized to us! After that talk we had a testimony meeting with our own Zones, en Espanol. It was a little wierd at first but we all got used to it and I was able to get up and share mi testimonio en Espanol...and for those of you who went to my farewell...I didn't have to use a cheat sheet haha. After that meeting I also got the chance to see Karly on our Temple walk and that was way fun!!! Seeing someone from the outside world helped me to know that it still existed. 

Even though we did have a ton of awesome parts of this week, we did have one mega bummer at the end. This last thursday was my teacher Hermano Miller's last day :(. He's leaving to go do what most R.M.s do in the summer after BYU- sell insecticide in St. Louis. He was such an awesome teacher and since we had such a small district, he was like the greatest EFY counselor/older brother that I never had! He had the greatest mission stories and would always make my day so much better! It was absolutely impossible to fall asleep in his class because of how much energy he has! It was like we would feed off of his energy just to make it through the day so I don't know how these next three weeks are going to go, but it made me think of how soon my time in the MTC will be over. I'm really going to miss Hermano Miller not only becaue of how funny and entertaining his classes were, but especially his example. He would leave his Spanish Book of Mormon in class just so that he could read it with us, but during one of our study times, we decided to look through his Book of Mormon just for kicks and giggles. We ended up naming his mission copy "the Golden Plates" because of how marked up they were! It is unbelievable and I know impossible to try and explain in e-mail. To try and get everyone to understand...we ended up wondering if he even served a mission or if he just spend two years in a room marking scriptures. We began to feed off of his study techniques that we would find and spend so much time looking through it, wondering if he had marked it all just for show, or if it had deeper meaning, and if it did, what was it!? We eventually asked him if he would "accidentally" leave them at a girls house, because if any woman were to look through that copy, he wouldn't even have to propose to get her hooked! He changed the way I study my scriptures and made one of my largest desires from the mission to be a deeper understanding of the Book of Mormon. Once I tried to study like he did, I started finding so much that I couldn't believe some of the messages that had gone over my head the hundreds of times I had read these verses before! Its getting to the point where I could write a full fledged dissertation on 1 Nephi 17:11 and its spriritual significance to us! Its amazing to look at just one verse and think, "why is this in the Book of Mormon and how can I relate it to me?" 

And to finish off stories of este semana, I have to talk about the "Battle of the Two Towers." So what happens in the MTC, is much like the Cannon Center, the food got old about a two weeks in and everything started to taste the same. Well the way we would treat this problem at BYU is just go eat somewhere else, but we lack that privelage here in the MTC, so we decided to make our eating experiences a little more entertaining. What they always have in the corner of the MTC, are towers of cereal that are supposed to be sufficient for every meal. To put it in persepctive, one tower equals about 45 boxes of cereal. Now, to keep our meals interesting, we decided to have our zone take down two towers for dinner: Life, and Tooty Frooties. Its kind of sad how long we looked forward to this meal and how much time we spent planning it out, but an additional twist we threw in was an afterburn party of Cranberry and Orange Juice (excuse my description but to make the nature of the beverages understandable, it would be like having an afterburn party with just Pepto Bismol.) So on our P-Day eve, we all marched triumphantly into the cafeteria, grabbed about 7 bowls each person (averaging out to about 105 bowls, because using the same bowl over and over again would just be too convenient.) We took the towers by storm, and conquered life within 5 minutes! We would fill the bowls, eat, stack (to show how much "Life" you dominated) and go back for more! After destroying life, we began on the Tooty Frooties tower. About 7 minutes into that one, the cafetia staff came and told us that we needed to stop eating and leave the cafeteria. We got about 7/9 of the Tooty Frooties tower, but apparently we were going to cost the MTC "too much" for dominating the cereal towers. All that me and the rest of zone 23 have to say is that the battle may be over, but the war has just begun. Even though the massive amounts of cereal have pretty much ruined our digestive tracts, making us take a trip to the baño every five minutes, we will come back with a vengance! Haha love it here and enjoy the opportunities to learn more and more every day! Love you all so much and miss you guys a ton!

Les quiero mucho!

Elder Wilson

The end of week 5!

Ah man I cannot believe that we're ending week 5!!! The more time that goes by, we get more used to living missionary life and that makes time go sooo fast! And to reply to your e-mail about it being monotonous here, it's great to be able to learn so much but we all feel like dogs chained to a gate - we're just so stoked to get out and go convert some people!!! 

Probably one of the best parts of this week was general conference! I just remember everyone getting so amped about it and by the way this has got to be the first time that I've woken up before General Conference started! I just remember getting super super excited when we had personal study time before it started, wrote down the questions that I had, and then we finally got a couple districts to ride the elevator down to the auditorium where the MTC would watch Conference. When we got in, Elder Lanham just broke into "Ye Elders Of Israel" and everyone, (which we probably broke the weight limit on the elevator), joined in singing at about 5 times the normal speed with a pause......doors opened at floor two....doors closed again.....and break right back into finish it! I don't really think that I can sufficiently explain what it felt like to hear "This is the 182 Annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of....", It truly put any premiere I've watched to shame. I totally got the chills! Another exciting announcement, which is kind of a sad thing, but this was the first Conference that I didn't fall asleep in! And going in as a missionary, it was so awesome to hear any talk that had to do with the work and at the end I had like 20 some pages of notes! 

It made me think of the quote by President Kimball when someone asked him what you do when you're in a boring sacrament meeting and he said, "I don't know, I've never been to one." I could talk forever about conference but my favorite talk was probably Elder Scott's on revelation. It is so amazing here at the MTC how it just sets the scene for revelation! Sometimes I'm just thinking "Ah slow down haha I can only write so fast!" 

Another awesome part of the week was when we were meeting with our Progressive Investigator. Now I know that this is only a prep Investigator, but even so this guy that we have been working with has been a "real piece of work" (which President Shumway said that we should probably refer to our investigators with different names haha.) But anyway, the background on Pablo is that he is from Cordaba, Argentina, just about half of his family was baptized and he's meeting with us to try and understand why his family was converted as fast as they were. 

I remember our first meeting with him about two weeks ago when we asked him about his religious backround he said "I was born Catholic and I'll die Catholic." So as you can see, it took quite a while to get on the same page as him, but this past week we decided to speak with him about the plan of Salvation, but mainly the Atonement. We had just gotten him to start saying personal prayers so we thought that it would be a miracle if we could even get him to come to church with us! So as we get into our lesson, I really can't explain exactly what happened there, but the Spirit just took over. The language stopped being a problem and as we were explaining what the Atonement promises us, we were able to connect why his family made the decisions that they did. The Spirit was so tangible in that room! One crucial thing that I learned through these examples is the importance of the Book of Mormon. Now imagine that you are in a house, and the Spirit is represented by the outside air. If you try and accommodate your investigator's beliefs with the Bible (which is still a great tool), it's like opening a window. If you use the Book of Mormon, it's like kicking every door open and shattering every window! As John Bytheway says, "A good missionary uses the Bible, a great missionary uses the Book of Mormon." I will never forget the feeling and look in Pablo's eyes when I had him read 2 Nephi 2:6-8. I then had him read Alma 11:40 and turned to Elder Johansson and said in an excited whisper "We're baptizing him!" (about 30 times!) So we did as prompted and invited him to follow the example of Jesus Christ and be baptized. To our shock, he accepted! 

While praying on our knees, I remember I had a smile that I just could not keep off my face, and I truly felt the joy of missionary work! Well I could talk so much more about stuff here but my e-mail time is up. But, I wanted to give a shout out to Uncle Scott and you guys for the packages this week! Better than Christmas!! Love you guys so much and it was such an awesome treat to be able to call you this week for "immunizations." Tell all the other prospective missionaries that they need to forget their immunization papers at home and then they'll get extra e-mail time along with the opportunity to call the family! Wish I could be at baby Davey's blessing but give everybody my love! This Easter sunday we'll get three General Authorities for sacrament meeting and with the talk and hype about it you would think that Jesus might even show up. love you all!

 Elder Wilson

Justin's plaque. Hanging on the wall outside the Bishops office