7.24.2012

Why hello familamily....

What is going on?! I have loved getting all your letters and dear elders and emails! It makes my day everytime and I am sure that is how it will be for the rest of my mission as well. Well I just got out of a 9 hour medical training...yes on P-day of all days (8-5). I am SO tired. We had a couple 5 minute breaks and 40 minutes for lunch and the rest was in a chair lecturing from a powerpoint with a manual in front of us with 105 pages of front and back slides. The doctor that trained us was Dr. Wooley that is the doctor over all of the MTC's world wide. Him and his assistant seemed to get off track alot, and tell dry jokes i.e. "Shakespeare wrote about Tuberculosis in his Hamlet play when he said "TB or not TB... that is congestion" So it was a little bit of a long day, but they had lots of intersting information. There were 2 other sisters going to be nurses in Guatalmala and the other El Salvador mission (San Salvador) and then 4 doctors with their wives going to various places. So trying to bridge the gap between what docs vs. nurses need to know was difficult sometimes but I think I got some solid information. They gave us a "retail 150 dollars" (or so they say) medical kit. Who knows if I will be able to fit that in my bag....leaning towards probably not but I guess we will see. I wish I could write more but they give you no time seriously!

Anyway so I fly out to the Guat MTC on Tuesday at 8:30 from SLC. My companion Dansie and I are getting a little nervous. Crazy that it's in a week. Just barely when I opened my email I had an email from the mission president's wife saying how excited they were for me to come and how they were waiting for me. That was way sweet, got me excited again. So much happens during the week that it is literally impossible to tell you everything I want to but I will try to tell you a few things that happened this week that I thought were special.....So my comp and I are still teaching our (fake) progressing investagitor Mari and we had a lesson last week that I probably felt the spirit the strongest of any of our lessons so far. We were teaching her how to pray and why prayer is important in our broken Spanish but I could just feel the spirit so strong that I knew this was what she needed even if she couldn't understand anything we said, she could at least feel it. So she taped a video for our district as an investagor (shes actually one of our 4 teachers) and in the video she was talking to all 10 of us, generally, but one part stood out to me and I wrote it down- she said "Even though I couldn't understand a lot of what some of your were saying, I could feel how what you were trying to teach me, meant the world to you and it made me want to feel so strongly about something like you did so thats why I keep inviting you back." A couple days later I was meeting with her individually for a teacher student planning session or something that she does with everyone and I told her about how strongly I had felt the spirit that very last time we had taught her, and she said "I want to read you something I wrote in my journal" and then she proceded to say the exact thing that I had heard from the video and wrote down. The spirit it seriously amazing and works in SO many different ways.

One last quote Jeffrey R. Holland "Your first convert will always be yourself." Remember this, it doesn't just apply to missionaries but everyone....you can't bring others to the gospel if you aren't there yourself. I loved that, I hope you do too.

Love you all and am so grateful for everything you do for me......all the support and love is felt here is the Provo CCM. Can't wait to hear from everyone!

xoxo- Lyndee