"Hasta Ver! Hasta Ver! Para siempre Dios este con..." In case you are wondering, these are the sounds we will be hearing three days from now! It's so crazy haha I feel like it was just yesterday that we sent off the oldest District singing "God Be With You 'Till We Meet Again" en Espanol! Nine weeks later and it is our turn! By the way...before I start with my updates and such I just wanted to give a huge shout out to Carlie & Porter!! Man I'm proud of you guys but especially Porter. For as long as I've known Carlie she's always had everything figured out and for you to be worthy enough to marry up to her...you must've worked pretty hard on your mish in L.A.!!! So I just hope that I can work as hard as you did and Carlie...still cannot believe that you are married but I love you and congrats!!!
Well this week has been pretty nerve racking for me as my last week in the MTC! My brain feels like a suitcase that you just keep putting more and more and more stuff into and once you try to zip it up...you realize you've put in a little more than it can handle. No matter how hard I work and study I can't help but be scared out of my mind that I will be in the field teaching REAL progressive investigators by this next Monday!!! I'm way stoked to leave the MTC and will miss all the friends and teachers that I've had here but am so stoked to do some real missionary work and see just how good my Spanish is. I feel pretty comfortable here with a bunch of white people but I'm so scared that once I get out to Tejas I'll forget everything and only be able to muster out a "Hola...estoy bien...." Oh boy its making me want to cry right now haha so I can't wait to get the first few days of humiliation over and then buckle down for some success!
Speaking of success we had a "Baptism" last week for "Angelica." Even though she was a "role played" investigator, I can see that we learned so much and our teaching really changed ever since we started. For all the prospective missionaries out there, I would just have to tell them to really love the investigator. So many return missonaries had told me that so I would pray for them every now and then and prepare for my lessons so that they would enjoy that, but there is a sincere difference between caring about them and just giving your heart to them. At the beginning we saw the "Preach My Gospel" lessons as a checklist, and to me, the faster we checked all the boxes, the faster the baptisms will come. I just feel like when we all start our missions, we have been caring about ourselves for too long and can't see our investigators perspective, what they understand, and be able to discern thier feelings. When we had "Coaching Missionary Study", I remember Hermana Cooper asking me, "I know you care how your lessons go, but do you really love Angelica..." She totally caught me off guard, and when I thought about it, I didn't have feelings even close to the feelings I should have had. I cared about how the lessons would make me look instead of her growth Spiritually. Once I started praying for her every day, putting her name on the Temple Prayer list, really started asking her questions about her life and not just what she thought about our church, if she followed up on our committments and so forth, the change in our teaching was so tangible. You could literally feel a change in the room and see that the relationship we had before had completely transformed. When we stopped caring about whether she would say yes or no to the baptismal questions, that was when she really grew and eventually accepted our Baptism Invitation. So last week we made a card and the whole works for our "Baptism" haha it was awesome. I'm just so glad that I learned this lesson before I hit the field and would have to say it's even more important than any Spanish I have picked up in these last 9 weeks. Still having kind of a tough time adjusting to the whole missionary schedule and trying to forget the fact that my Lakers are in the playoffs about now and that I have to kick myself out of bed at 6:30 every day, but it's a work in progress.
Super super super excited to meet President Durant and my new companion and literally get my mission started! I'm also way stoked to ride in one of those giant metal things that have wheels and go really fast! I've forgotten what they're called but I know that I haven't been in one for two months and think it is probably the longest time in my life I have lived without one. I'm also stoked out of my mind for the Texan food!!! The MTC has asked us to not include any "negative" comments specifically about the MTC in our e-mails home, but the scriptures say that liars are "thrust down to hell" so I will just say that I only eat the food they serve here to keep myself alive. I have lost my appetite here at about week two when everything started to taste the same so I am stoked to get my TEXICAN going! Burritos, Tacos, Carne Asada, and STEAK!!! Well again, way stoked but wayyyyy nervous for Dallas and I know for a fact, that I will have some good "greenie" stories for next week. The thought of being in the field for my first few days makes me feel like there will be a huge target painted on my chest but I guess we will have to see how it goes!
Con todos mi corazon y amor,
Elder Justin (scared and nervous out of his mente) Wilson
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