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