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!