Halfway...through the MTC

"Mismo Martes" 

 Alright! Halfway through the MTC already.  Time is flying. Elder Powell and I decided to get matching ties this week.  Pretty awesome I know.  We do what's called "Mismo Martes."  We made it up.  In English it means same Tuesdays, or matching Tuesdays.  doesn't really have the same ring to it in English, but it was legit.

 Elder Powell signing the back of my tie.  I signed his too.  Now our matching ties will always be super special and a cool memory. Whaddup!

 Goodie box to celebrate half way through the MTC.  Thanks family!

Celebrating MTC style.  Doesn't get much better than this!

"Till We Meet Again"

 We lost another district this week. It included Elder Kenney and Elder May, our first Zone leaders.  It's tradition when a district in our zone leaves to sing a stirring rendition of "Para Siempre Dios Este Con Vos:, or "Till We Meet Again".  All of the Elders in the circle are in the district leaving.  Less than 3 weeks now and that will be me....

Lost and Found

 As people leave, they often leave little trinkets behind.  Elder Powell and I have been good at collecting the coolest ones...pictures. And now our wall is completely decorated. It's awesome and I think I am going to take some of those pictures with me when I leave.

 This week was so fast. I don't even remember what happened. It's like Elder May told us, they all start molding together and turning into a blur. That was so hard to imagine when he told me that my first day here. And every single I did was so seared into my mind.

Good news with Ian this week. We have taught him 2 additional times since he last said he didn't really want to hear from us anymore. When we go in there we usually have a completely different lesson plan than we end up teaching. Well, not completely different, but still different enough that we would not have said the things we did unless the Spirit had told us too. Like this week I felt I needed to ask him a question that is a hard one to ask. If I hadn't been prompted to, I don't think I could have ever asked him, "are you feeling overwhelmed as a father?" That is a pretty awkward question, but the Spirit is always right and that is exactly what he needed to hear. All of our visits with him have been 10-15 minutes, so we have had a really hard time making too much progress with him. However, he's starting to get fired up. He has kept out first commitment of reading 2Nephi2 (which we hadn't planned on telling him to read, bu we felt he should read it). And he read it because he wanted to, not because we told him too. That's what it's all about, getting the investigator to WANT to do all of these things. They have to have the desire to read the BOM every day. They have to have the desire to go to church 3 hours every Sunday. All of these things bring so many blessings and so much happiness to all of our lives. I think sometimes as life long members we forget that. Sometimes we're like "ugh, 2 more hours of church. I really don't want to be here today," or "I guess I should read my scriptures today." Even doing it because you SHOULD do it makes you miss out on lots of blessings. We SHOULD be pumped up because of these opportunities. If we're not psyched out about doing these things, how are we going to get investigators psyched out?

Antonio our other investigator, he's loving the gospel. He is only 19 years old and he is already supporting his whole family of 7, who are all in Mexico. He is super stressed out. He told us in our very first lesson how sad and tired he always is. I can already see how what the Spirit is teaching him is improving his life. We helped him to realize that prayer is a two way communication between him and God. He really liked that God can talk back to him. I know he has already received lots of answers to his prayers, and his prayers are now so much more sincere. When we taught him about baptism he told us he was already baptized when he was a baby in the Catholic church. We read the scripture from Moroni8:8 and 8:11. He just sat there for a minute. Then he's like, "yeah... that totally makes sense. Babies have no sins. They can't do anything wrong." Then he asked if we were sure it's ok if he gets baptized again. We said of course! We have a date for his baptism set for the 1st of July. I didn't remember how to say June in Spanish, so July was the earliest we could get him in the agua.

Sebastiana is our 3rd investigator. We challenged her to be baptized for a second time on Wednesday. The first time she didn't give us a yes, but this time she really wanted to. She's only 15 years old, so she has to get permission from her mom first. When we met her, she had no purpose in her life. She had few friends, and seemed bored and sad in our lessons. We finally got her to pray in our 3rd lesson with here this week, and she went to church last weekend! Last visit we challenged her to go to a YW activity. She said she liked the kids her age at church, and we think some ward fellowshipping will really make her even more excited about joining. Plus, she really needs some friends, she's a lonely person and she needs that.

I don't know if I told you, but our first week here we had Russell M Nelson come talk to us. Whoops, sorry if that slipped my mind. No more quorum of the 12 yet, but the 70 are always so good. People complain, but they always still bring tears to my eyes. The Spirit is always so strong here; it's amazing. Last Sunday (Sundays are the bomb btw) after our devotional (after devotionals on Sundays we get to watch a movie for an hour. Love it. On Tuesdays after devotionals we have a district testimony meeting) we watched The Testament en espanol. I think that's what it's called? The one in the Americas where Jesus comes at the end and Joseph Smith's dad plays one of the guys? We watched it in Spanish. The Spirit is the universal language for real. We were all bawling. so good. Yesterday we had TRC for the second time. The spirit was so strong there too. We gave commitments to both of the members we talked with. It sounds funny, but members need commitments too. We'll probably never see them again, but I felt that they both really wanted to do what we asked them to. One of the ladies we talked with was 54. Elder Powell and I were able to share 2 scriptures with her we weren't planning on talking about at all. But they were perfect for her. The spirit was so strong in our only 20 minute long visit she started crying. I know she heard from us exactly what she needed to hear that day.

 I love the letters. Keep them coming. So this week and last I also got letters from lots of my friends: Garrett, Matt, Mike, (last of the goon squad), Graham, Emily, Lauren, and Naomi sent me a letter and postcard with some cool pictures all the way from Costa Rica. She wrote all in Spanish of course. It was great. Tell everyone thanks for the letters, and that they can use dear elder anytime. It's free, fast, and easy. Les quiero!

Con amor, Elder Moffitt

MTC week 3

Wow, what a handsome......companionship!

MTC week 2

Finally, I found the infamous MTC map

Elder Moffitt & Elder Powell

He's got the whole world in his hands....or at least the Provo temple!

So my last investigator Jorge... the investigator of my first week at the mtc. So our investigators are actually MTC teachers who are portraying people they knew from their missions. So they're all real people being real people, but we're not actually talking to non-members, see what I'm saying? So we had to drop Jorge because Hermano Snyder (who was being Jorge) became our teacher and told us what we were doing good and bad. He's a super good teacher. So we have 2 teachers I think I already told you. Our other maestra is Hermana Jensen. They are both our investigators now. Their names are Antonio and Sebastiana. You only have to teach 2 investigators the rest of the time at the mtc. But you also have the option of trying to pick up more if you want... so we did.

The Elders in Elder Moffitt's district

Most MTC districts only have about 6-8, Elder Moffitt's has 12

Yesterday when we found that out, Elder Powell and I both said we wanted to try and get another investigator. It's a little more tricky with a third one, because he doesn't have to let you in his door at all. We made it in though. The first lesson is usually short, around 15 minutes or so. It is so important to get to know people, so we spent almost the whole time just connecting with him and really showing him how much we cared for him and how much the Lord cares for him. Oh woops, his name is Ian. Ian is 38, is married and has 3 kids. He moved here from Chile 3 years ago and is trying to get this medical license here like he had in Chile. He doesn't seem to have any big problems and he doesn't want much to do with any religion. That's the problem. We didn't know how to mold a lesson around his needs at all. At the end he told us how we are really nice guys and how the he thinks highly of Mormons, buuuuuuut the church isn't for him. He isn't interested, and he didn't want us to come back. Then Elder Powell bore a super strong testimony to him. Ian said, ok you can come back one more time. We got another chance, so we'll have to bring the super spirit on Saturday.

Yesterday we was busy. Besides teaching Ian and Antonio (and our progress with Antonio is going so great. We have only taught him 2 lessons. I'll tell you about him in a sec) we did something called TRC. That is some crazy stuff. So, what is TRC you are dying to know? We go have two 20 minute lessons/talks with people from the outside world. No more people portraying investigators (who definitely feel real anyway, because they are... somewhere out there). The people we meet in TRC are mostly all members. Some strong. Some inactive. Some non-members though. They are all volunteers who want to come in and feel the spirit by talking to the missionaries... in Spanish. The first man we met was actually the head of the TRC department for like 5 different lanuages including Spanish. After talking to him for 20 minutes we felt really good because he was easy to understand and we felt the spirit in the room for sure. Out next TRC volunteer had served a mission in Argentina. I'll tell you what, they've got some weird accents down there. Argentinians I thin even boast that they don't speak Spanish. They've got their own special dialect of it. So he talked really fast and with his unusual way of pronouncing words Elder Powell and I only caught half of what he said. It was enough though. We still almost always knew WHAT he was talking about, although we missed some of the details. Humbling to go in and be completely out of the loop after understanding out investigators that we've been working with this week.

Elder Powell trying to snag some extra breakfast items!

Study time

Mail time....happy time!

He did always want to be a "Ghost buster"

Fresh Cinnamon Roll.....Thanks Bishop Family!

What missionaries do on "P" day, hope the guy on top doesn't fall!

They must have quite the store and barbershop at the MTC...new suspenders and a comb-over....????

Is that Clark Kent at the MTC?

Elder Kenney, Elder Moffitt, Elder May (zone leaders)

Elder Moffitt left  his room and came back to find this beautiful little Christmas tree at his door.  I wonder how many months  it

has been making the rounds at the MTC,  at least 6 probably!

I have quite a few pictures for you all. Two weeks worth right? ok, I'll try to get them going, if not then I'll just write you some more stuff and try again next time. Love you!

Well, it took me half an hour to get all those pictures, so I'm out of time again already. But I think the time is well spent. The pictures are fun to look at I'm sure, and they help to give you a good idea of what I'm doing here. I skipped like half the pictures I took in total too! It's ok. The ones I skipped are similar to the ones I sent, or just less exciting. So, until next Friday...

MTC week 1

Elder Moffitt met Elder Moffitt at the temple this week. 

One of the few Moffitt's we've ever met that spell their name correctly!

Dear Fam and anyone else who is interested,

Wow. Super busy first week. Elder Powell and I have already taught cinco lessons to our first investigator, Jorge. He is such a great guy, but he really had a hard time finding happiness. I'll try to do a run down by the day of what happened this week. Friday after I e-mailed you was great. P-day means you basically have extra time for gym, studying, or sleeping. Whichever you choose. Not too much time though. Since there isn't as much set time to study on p-day I end up using lots of that extra time to get some more studying in. Our whole zone goes to the temple on  p-day, because we all have the same p-day. The temple was superb. Always is. And we still have a class after the temple trip too. Classes are 3 hours long. Sometimes, that can get to be reeeeeaaaaalllll long. The first hour is Spanish instruction. The second is Gospel instruction (in English) and the last hour is how we can apply this to our investigators and help them more (also in English). So what I've learned this last week is that I am not here for 6 weeks to learn Spanish. Nope, not at all. We have  usually around 2-3 hours of Spanish a day. The rest is la idioma de el epsiritu. Es mas importante que espanol.

Saturday. Saturday's are super busy. Saturday is when we taught our second lesson to Jorge. It didn't go very well. We had this whole great lesson planned out, and we stuck to it. That was the problem. We didn't let the spirit come in and guide us to talk about. We are not here teaching lessons; we're here teaching people. We didn't spend enough time getting to know Jorge on our first lesson, so we didn't know how to best  apply the lesson to him. Also, Elder Powell didn't feel as included in this lesson because Jorge was speaking pretty fast, and he didn't know what he was saying at all. I didn't understand much, but I still got what he was trying to tell us. Oh, on Saturday we also found out about a talk that we had to write for Sunday. Every Sunday we have to write a 3-5 minute talk en espanol for church. Only 2 people from the zone get picked to talk, so luckily we were all spared some embarassment on our first Sunday here. No one from my district was chosen. My district is really big. We have 12 people. 4 hermanas, y 8 elderes. Most have like 6 or 8 people total. But everyone in our district is so great. I love them all.

Sunday is a day of rest. Seriously, it's muy bueno. No class. Just lots of church meetings and studying time. We also have a devotional every Sunday night. All of sacrament meeting is in Spanish. As you may have noticed, I have bought a few things since I've been here including a himno. It's hard to sing in Spanish. When you're unfamiliar with any of the words and have to read them real fast it can be hard to remember the tune of the song...

Monday. Monday was our best lesson for Jorge, or one of the best anyway. We had talked to him before mostly about himself, God, and had to lovingly convince him that Mormons are good people (he used to hate Mormons before we started teaching him). Monday was our day to go over the restoration. In PMG it says that the spirit often testifies most strongly when you testify of that, so we decided he really needed to learn about it. He only knew about the BOM from what we had read to him before. He liked it, but we hadn't gone over its origins yet. The spirit was really strong the whole lesson. We gave him a BOM that lesson (We tried to give him one before but he told us he was going  to get one from his member friend, Cesar. He didn't. Lesson learned: always give him one yourself). Then we challenged him to read and pray about it. And we finally got Jorge to pray at the end of the lesson! Before he would never pray, although he did let us pray. He said he was too sinful. God didn't love him. It wouldn't be good for him to pray. So our first lessons we tried telling him all that wasn't true. It was difficult to do, so we thought the best way for him to know of God's love would be to read about it in the BOM and pray. That's how we tied everything  in and related the importance of the BOM to him.

Tuesday we went in with smiling faces to our lesson. He asked us why we were so happy. We told him it was because the gospel of Jesus Christ brings us happiness. The day before when he said the closing prayer he prayed to bless him mom. After that lesson, we were like "oh crap. we never asked about his family. we hope she's ok." We found out on Tuesday she had cancer and his dad was already dead. We talked to him about how families can be together forever and that brought him lots of hope. Wow. my computer time is almost up for the day and I need to write so much more!!! We challenged him to be baptized at the end of the lesson next month. He said he would be if he is clean by then. He likes to party, and drink. So we still had some work to do.

Wednesday was good. We found out about his reading. It was consistent, but his praying still needed work. We got him to understand they go hand in hand. He can't know God loves him solely by reading from the BOM. Without that second essential spiritual witness you get from prayer, it's hard to know spiritual truths. Seriously, I have no time left. We challenged him to come to church and baptism again. Then we were sorely disappointed when we found out on Thursday that we had to drop him. Jorge (Hermano Snyder) became our second teacher. Now he's teaching us along with Hermana Jensen. It was heartbreaking. He was doing so much better. Hey, Here's a good idea. Try not to e-mail much, or anything at all. I only have an hour on the computer. You know I'm a slow reader, and if I have to waste 10-20 minutes reading I have less time to tell you about my week. I love all the letters I've been getting! You can tell me more in those instead because I have half an hour every night to write in my journal and read letters. Love you all! Thanks for the cookies and all the fantastic letters. They make my day each time I get one. Tell the Bishop family thanks for the cinammon rolls. They were fantastic too. Btw, I can't e-mail girls... so they have to write me if they want to talk to me. At least while I'm at the MTC. It may be the same in the field too. Who knows. Anyway, I love you!

I've arrived!

So, as you have now guessed, Friday is my p-day. Currently I am sitting at a computer in the laundry room and writing this while my clothes are getting washed. I have only been here for 2 days now, yet so much has happened.

I'll start with the first day. Right after I got dropped off I was carted through a mass production line to get my nametag, books, key, asked if I was set apart and went through the temple, and taken to my room. I only had time to walk in the door and put my stuff down before we left again.

As I was leaving another Elder walked in with all of his stuff. His name was Elder Powell and he is mi companero primero. He is 21 and he is from Utah. We are a great match.

Turns out we both like to lift weights too, so that's what we're going to do when we finally get to go to the gym. We had orientation, then dinner a while later. That night we went into 3 big rooms with about 50 missionaries. Then we had these little group discussions with a few "investigators." Not many people got to talk, but both Elder Powell and I both were able to.

Then came the first night. It turns out one of the other Elders in our dorm is a crazy loud snorer, worse than Ryan Smith. Now you know that's impressive. After looking at my watch and finding out it was after midnight and I still hadn't fallen asleep due to this I said like 4 prayers that it would be ok. Then after a particularly weird sounding snore, Elder Powell started laughing. We were both  kept awake, and were able to talk to each other for like half an hour that night (morning?) before we finally fell asleep

The sleep problem was solved yesterday with a simple purchase of earplugs at the bookstore. Mi companero y yo slept very soundly last night with those. Yesterday was a super  super busy day. After personal study, we had a meeting about our purpose for being here then went into 3 hours of classroom instruction. Whenever I say class, you can assume it is all in Spanish... because it is. Then lunch. Then 3 more hours of class. This class was very different though. We were not really instructed. We did the instructing. We taught our first lesson... to an investigator... solamente en espanol. Seriously, Elder Powell and I have already felt the gift of tongues. How else could you talk to an investigator for 20 minutes in Spanish after being here for only a day and a half? Saying that though, we still missed lots of what he was saying. The only thing we were able to talk to him about was God and His love for him. We briefly touched upon prayer; we taught him how to pray. And we also read a scripture from the Book of Mormon. At least we have another appointment on Saturday with Jorge, that's our investigator's name. We offered him a BOM, but he told us he was going to get one today from his Mormon friend Cesar. Unfortunately we did not give him a challenge before we left. Our  whole lesson plan kind of fell apart when we walked through the door and he started talking a million miles an hour in a foreign language. Oh well, we already have a much better plan for next time we both think.

MTC day!

Packing the car....on the way to the MTC

A quick stop for lunch at the Sizzler before going to the MTC.
What a surprise to find out that they give new Elders a
free lunch and an enormous rootbeer float!
Nick said the blessings from serving a full time mission
are already evident!

Saying good-bye in front of the Provo temple before

crossing the street to the MTC.

Nick said the Provo temple is his favorite temple

because it's where he learned to love the temple.

His last semester at BYU he went to the temple once

a week and loved it.