Week 6 - One by One

My new name tag both in Chinese and English

Well another week down, and only 3 more to go. I have really come to love this place, but I am definitely ready to leave, but too bad I still got 3 weeks to go. We got a new district last week, and and they're alright I guess, and since I'm now a part of the oldest district in the zone, we finally had the opportunity to pull the same pranks on them that were done to us. So there is this little puppet of a Chinese lion and what we did was while all of the Elders were in the stalls we have a little drum, and we have the lion dance around the stalls and we flicker the light. Yeah it's pretty pathetic, but when you're in the MTC for this long everything becomes funny. The Elders just laughed, and we deny it ever happened. We just say it was the mysterious "poop" dragon that only strikes when a new district comes.

The language is still extremely hard. This last week has been extremely hard teaching our "investigators" which our teachers act as investigators they had. One had a baptismal date, and a couple days before, he said he no longer wanted to be baptized because he said his family would abandon him if he did. It's extremely hard to first figure out what we should do, and second we don't know how to say a lot of stuff. He just keeps throwing curve balls at us every time we teach him, and we don't have time to prepare for them and our other "investigators" don't keep their commitments, so that can be frustrating at times. I guess they're just prepping us for the field and having us figure out how to help people with their problems on their own.

So Elder Bednar spoke here yesterday, and it was probably one of the most powerful devotionals I've ever heard, and that's saying a lot. I've seen several different apostles speak in person, but this one was just so different. The foundation of his talk was that Jesus Christ Knows every single one of us personally. His talk was titled "One by One", and he used the Saviors visit to the America's in 3 Nephi as the foundation of his devotional. I usually space out during some parts of every devotional, but this time my eyes and ears were glued on the podium, and I listened to every word he said. After his remarks the choir of over 800 missionaries sang a song that he wrote called "One by One" and it was the first time it had ever been performed, and it will be published in the New Era next month, and I highly recommend reading through the lyrics. It's such a powerful song, and singing it after a talk by a Apostle of the Lord it that much better. 

So that's everything that happened this week. It's the MTC nothing happens. I don't know what happens out in the real world except for the NBA finals I got my connections here in the MTC. Go Warriors! Wish it was the Blazers, but oh well! Oh and one last thing people keep asking me hows the food here, and a scriptures that describes it perfectly is Jeremiah 4:19 and you'll probably break down laughing, or else it means the MTC has broken me. 

Love you all!!!

Elder Eveson

  Yeah, that's why I don't like to wear glasses.  That is my comp's glasses