Elder Uchtdorf es mi ciudad! - MTC Week 5

Bienvenidos a semana 5!

This week was pretty insane, we had lots going on. This email will probably be long but It should be worth it :)

One thing that my district has been saying a lot is "_____ es mi ciudad" when we thing something is awesome. It means "_____ is my city" and I'm not entirely sure why everyone does it but it's caught on fast (Hence this email's title). We've been playing a lot of volleyball this week and a lot of the people in our district weren't very good at volleyball (Including me) but now we are a pretty great team! 

We had our last TRC with Jerald this week, which was pretty sad. We're pretty good friends with him and he eats lunch with us sometimes. With next week being our last week here, there's a bunch of other stuff we have to do so we don't have time for more lessons. Also we had a Skype TRC where we talked to a member over Skype. Our didn't go too well because our Hermana was driving while skyping with us! We could hardly hear her and I'm pretty sure she could hardly hear us. Other people said it was fun, though. 

Alright, now Thanksgiving.... Happy Thanksgiving by the way! (And happy birthday Mom :) ) 

Thanksgiving at the MTC was probably one of my favorite days of all time. We got up early at like 6am so we could go get good seats for our devotional. We were in the Choir so we had to be there anyways, but we had some insider information this week and so we knew who our speaker was going to me. Elder Freeman, my companion, told us that his Mom saw Elder Uchtdorf at a training meeting and he said he was going to be "spending Thanksgiving with the Missionaries." So, we knew like 4 days in advance who it was going to be! 

Elder Uchtdorf was amazing, as to be expected. His wife also came and she told us the story of how the missionaries found her. I'll include somethings about his talk at the end. After they spoke, the spent probably 20 minutes walking up and down the aisles shaking people's hands. Riight at the end they came to the front of the Bass section in the Choir so me and Elder Fifita got to shake their hands! Way cool. Come to find out, all the elders in our district got to, but none of the sisters did. 

After our first devotional, we went to our class for a bit while we waited for our assigned lunch time (Lunch was our Thanksgiving meal). Lunch was honestly better than expected. The food is getting kinda old at this point but I could tell the kitchen staff put some extra work into this thanksgiving meal. We had turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, candied yams, dinner rolls, pumpkin desserts, and eggnog. The eggnog was from BYU creamery and was like 850 calories for this little tiny bottle! Of course what ended up happening was my lactose intolerant companion chugged 2 of them in a minute, against my counsel :) I was still hearing about that mistake for 2 days after. 

After lunch we had a short devotional, then we went to watch "The Other Side of Heaven". It was pretty good and it was pretty fun to see hear the reactions of 600 missionaries when there was a kiss on screen. After that we went to do a service project. The service project as a whole was to make 350,000 breakfast meals that would be sent to kids in Utah that don't get breakfast. They had everyone in the MTC in the parking garage and we spent 1hr 45 mins making these meals assembly line style. My job was to get a bag, open it, put it under the funnel, then 4 people would dump the ingredients in and I would run it to the next station. Way cool experience and it was a lot of fun too. Our group supervisor said her goal for Thanksgiving was to send some pictures to our Moms so my mom should have a picture of me :) 

After that we had a sack dinner in our classroom then went to our 3rd devotional of the day. Hermana Arnold and Hermana Hopkins wrote some personalized notes for all of us too which was super cool. It was very sweet of them. At the devotional they had a singer and a guitarist come and play some songs for us which was way cool. Tanner James was the singers name I'm pretty sure, Michael Dowell(?) I think was the guitarist's name. I've definitely heard some of Michael's music before and If you've ever heard a hymn played on a guitar, it's probably this guy. He has recorded and published like 150 hymns/hymn medleys on guitar. It was waaay good. After that we got to walk around before bed and see all the Christmas lights around the MTC. Definitely a fantastic day. 

Now, for the good stuff. Here's what I learned from Elder Uchtdorf on Thanksgiving. He talked about gratitude for a good chunk of his talk. Some of the things he highlighted were how the "higher law of Gratitude" Is being grateful for everything, including our trials. Trials always bring us closer to God if we remember him and endure them well. He also talked about how Gratitude can be a tool for us, when we are struggling. He promised that, 

"Gratitude brings clarity, calmness, and happiness. It gives us wings to fly over the darkest valleys and the deepest pits. 

It's great to be grateful all year round, and it's sad that we usually only focus on it during this time of year, but I know it's something that can help us always. Elder Uctdorf also said 

"Grateful hearts lead to Greatness." 

I know that when we are grateful it really does make us great. It makes us more like Christ and people notice when we are more like Christ. 

Well my stay at the MTC is almost over, only 10 days left!!! I got my Travel plans this week and I'll be in Washington by 1:00pm on December 4th. My Spanish is getting way better, but I'm excited to get absolutely destroyed in the field for the first few months while I learn more about Spanish. Wish me luck! 

Los amo a todo! 

Elder Thompson

Fotos: 

1.  Our terrible Thanksgiving picture
2. Some cool clouds and the Provo temple
3. MTC lights!
4. Nativity Scene at MTC
5. A nice message one of our Teachers left for us before she left for Thanksgiving

Family,

Thanks for all your emails this week, I hope your Thanksgiving was good with Grandma and Grandpa! Also thanks for your Thanksgiving card, I always love getting mail! I hope the usual crazy stuff with work, school, and home are going well. 

I got my travel plans this week, so I'll be getting up at like 5:15am so I can be at the travel office by 5:45am. My flight is like 2 hours, but I go back an hour with time zones, so the flight is like an hour haha. Pretty crazy how close it is! I won't be under the "Y" for much longer.

That food place really does sound like something I'd love. The MTC cafeteria is like that sometimes. We'll have like Korean beef, taco salad, and yogurt parfaits or something. There's just always new stuff. Sometimes it's good, usually it's just OK. Actually last night they had this chicken skewers with rice thay had a spicy peanut sauce. It was probably one of the best things I've had here. 

I was pretty sick yesterday and still kind of today. My skin is all sensitive and my throat hurts. I'll probably be fine by tomorrow. No worries. 

Same deal as always, email me if you can, I can chat most of today! I attached my travel itinerary if you wanna look at it. 

Love you all! 

Elder Thompson

Surprise Thanksgiving Text

We just sat down to enjoy our Thanksgiving feast when we received a surprise text from a kind stranger with this picture and message.

"Hi Moms! My name is Katie and I am working with your elders while they are packaging breakfast meals for local families. "Happy Thanksgiving" "Feliz dia de accion de gracias" "I love you" "Thanks for getting us here""

We were able to pass the phone around and share the picture with the Thompson's that we were enjoying the holiday with. It was a fun little moment.

Then later that evening another mom in the group text sent a link to an article about the service they did.

https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900043458/mormon-church-missionaries-grateful-to-serve-others-on-thanksgiving-at-the-mtc.html

MTC Week 4

Hola Familia y Amigos! Benvenidos a semana cuatro! 

18 days left in the MTC! Santa vaca! 

Last Sunday there was a Chamber Choir called Lux Singers that came to the MTC for our Sunday Night Devotional. They sang ~8 songs about the Atonement and The Crucifixion and it was sooo good. It was probably my favorite devotional yet, just reminded me of my Choir days.They even sang a different arrangement of a song that I sang in Choir. 

Not even 2 days later on Tuesday we had Elder Gary E. Stevenson from the Quorum of the 12 come speak to us! He talked about how our Mission calls were divine and inspired, no matter where you're going. Pretty much the rest of his talk was focused on using the Scriptures, Preach My Gospel, and the Missionary handbook as our "Missionary Survival Kit". It was definitely a cool experience to see him in person! They broadcast the devotional live to all the MTCs around the world. I'm pretty sure me and my district got a close up shot in the broadcast because we were in the choir so I guess I'm technically worldwide famous now ;) 

Another thing this week is we had our first TRC with a member. (TRCs are practice lessons completely in Spanish). It was pretty cool to have someone who was actually fluent in Spanish to help us teach. Our members name was Jerald (Her-ald) which was pretty funny because the person we are teaching is named Jerald (Gerald). It was a really good experience and probably our best lesson yet! 

This week I've been learning and studying a lot about how the Book of Mormon plays a role in the Church. My companion and I are teaching a lesson about this in Priesthood meeting on Sunday so wish us luck ;) There's a really good quote from Preach my Gospel that says

"... The only problem the objector has to resolve for himself is whether the Book of Mormon is true. For if the Book of Mormon is true, the Jesus is the Christ, Joseph Smith was his prophet, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is true, and it is being led today by a prophet receiving revelation." 

I believe this applies to everything in our lives. Any questions of the soul, objections to The Church, or even personal questions you might have can be resolved by the Book of Mormon. It's also good to pray for a renewed answer that the Book of Mormon, even if you've felt you've received an answer in the past. 

My challenge this week is to read the Book of Mormon every day. BUT there's a catch :) Don't JUST read it. Every now and then, take a pause in your reading and ask yourself "Why is this in here? Out of ALL the things that could be in here, why is this in here for me." If you do those two things, I promise you'll feel a closer connection to the Book of Mormon and better understand its importance. 

Con amor,

-Elder Thompson

Fotos: 

1. The Elders in our District with one of our Español Maestros, Hermano Durrant

2. First Snow at the MTC

3. Panorama View South of the MTC

4. My Companion and I with our mission shirts

Hola Familia, 

Hope y'alls week went well! 

It was fun to hear about Alyssa's dance this week! All the pictures look great and it looks like fun times with good people. My district thinks it's hilarious how Alyssa was low-key roasting me by saying she was "Blazing the Trail" for the Thompson family ;) I thought it was funny too :) 

Glad to hear of a fun week of plays, shows, works, and more work! 

Mom was wanting to know more about my companion so here's some more info

So his name is Justin Freeman, he's from Santaquin, so not too far from Provo. He's going to Wisconsin, Milwaukee and loves to tell us how cold it is there every day :) He's a pretty cool guy and we get along pretty well. He definitely has presence in every room. He's a theater/choir person so he likes attention for sure. People say a lot here that there's a reason for every companionship. Elder Freeman is often very hard on himself with Spanish, and he's expressed a lot that he appreciates that I always have a good attitude to help him when he feels down. Not going to lie, that's not what I was expecting to be in the MTC, but I really am pretty much always happy here, even when I'm tired or hungry. 

I think one of the main things I'm learning from Elder Freeman is patience. He has a tendency to pack up slowly, get ready slowly, etc. I hate being late to things and so there's a conflict there sometimes. He also occasionally reminds me of some people that I didn't particularly like in High School, which totally isn't his fault. This week especially I've come to love him more for who he is, even if we have contrasting personalities. 

I was reading in the book Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: President Hinckley and I read something that I thought might help for you all to hear. 

I meet so many people who constantly complain about the burden of their responsibilities. Of course the pressures are great. There is much, too much, to do. There are financial burdens to add to all of these pressures, and with all of this we are prone to complain, frequently at home, often in public. Turn your thinking around. The gospel is good news. Man is that he might have joy [see 2 Nephi 2:25]. Be happy! Let that happiness shine through your faces and speak through your testimonies. You can expect problems. There may be occasional tragedies. But shining through all of this is the plea of the Lord:

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls.

“For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28–30.) 

I just like this so much! Even in the most stressful times, turn to the Lord. You don't have to do anything alone! Like I mentioned earlier, I'm surprised at how much staying positive has helped me here. We're always busy, so much to do and learn in short amounts of time. But when you look at the good in the word and focus on that, you can truly be happy. 

Like usual it's Saturday and I have my phone so if any of you wanna talk about other stuff I've got all day! 

Oh, and to answer your question, some of my favorite things about the MTC is all the languages you hear. Like I'll say Gracias to someone holding the door and then the person behind me is like Merci. Or maybe it's just a group of missionaries having a conversation in Hungarian, or Finnish, or something. I think languages are super cool so it's awesome to hear all the different ones. I like talking in Spanish too, we try to as much as possible. 

I also like the Choir here, Elmo Keck and Brother Eggett are the conductors and they do a good job. For Thanksgiving there's another General Authority coming to speak, (Everyone's pretty sure it's another member of the 12 or first pres.) and they specifically requested that the Choir sings "Let Zion in her Beauty Rise" which is a pretty cool Hymn I forgot that existed. 

Also the food is good.....sometimes it's too good. This week I've been super consistent with not eating too much since last week I went a little overboard :) Feelin good though. 

Alsoooooo Happy Early Birthday Mom! Have fun in San Diego! We get to watch a Disney movie on Thanksgiving! 

Con amor

-Elder Thompson   

Time flies: MTC Week 3

Hola Familia y Amigos! 

This week has gone by so fast! This email might be shorter than usual, just because as I try to remember each day this week it all just melts together in my head. I need to be better about writing something down each day in my Journal so this doesn't happen :) 

In our district we were down 1 Hermana Arnold this week because she was super sick after eating some bad food. We gave her a blessing yesterday which was a pretty cool experience. She's much better today luckily. Other district news includes, way too much leftover Halloween candy in packages, more district volleyball, district spikeball, and translating Star Wars quotes into Spanish! 

One thing that was new this week is TRC. TRC is where me and my companion go and teach a 'real' person to teach in Spanish. (I say 'real' because they told us some are and some aren't. We treat them as real.) My person's name is Jerald. He's a younger guy from Bolivia who wants to know more about the Church. So far we've had 3 lessons, but they've been cut short each time due to scheduling issues in this TRC building. Jerald doesn't really like to talk so we're working on just getting to know him better so he feels comfortable talking to us. It's definitely good practice for all parts of being a Missionary! 

We're starting to memorize phrases for all the lessons in Spanish now. The pace we're supposed to keep is memorizing 60+ new words and 9+ new phrases per day soooo we're definitely always busy. I realized the other day that In class, I can understand 99% of everything our teachers say! The gift of tongues is real! We're also starting to get in to some more grammar-heavy works like past preterit, past imperfect, and future tense. It's a lot of new info but compared to English, Spanish is a breeze. I have so much respect for the missionaries that come to the MTC to learn English! I've met missionaries from China, Japan, Brazil, Switzerland, Korea, Thailand, and so many more! 

One thing we've talked about a lot this week is loving people. Charity is probably one of the most difficult Christlike attributes to develop, but is definitely one of the most important. There are so many people in this world that do bad things, say things that offend you, or maybe even just inconvenience you. I'm learning more and more every day how important it is to love everyone. Everyone has their own things they are dealing with in their life and people make mistakes. That's just a fact of life, but as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we carry a special responsibility to be representatives of Christ at all times. I believe that is one reason why President Nelson made the course correction for the name of the Church. Christ would never talk badly about someone behind their back, Christ would never dislike someone because of what they look like, and Christ would never turn inward on himself and label himself more important than someone else. 

1 Corinthians:13 is a great chapter about Charity. I invite you to read it and ponder about how you can be more like Christ. Similar to "What would Jesus do?" the scripture,  3 Nephi 27:27

 "Therefore, what manner of men ought ye to be? Verily I say unto you, even as I am."

 is a great motto to live by. I'm learning more and more every day that life is to short to be sad, mad, angry, or depressed. You get this one mortal life... Live it as Christ did. Love others, serve others. 

I wasn't planning on writing this much about Charity, but I guess I just felt like it was right! I'll get off my soap-box now :) 

Los amo a todos! 

- Elder Thompson

Pictures this Week

1. Elder Fifita being cool as always

2. Me being....less cool as always :) 

3. District Temple Visit

4. Provo Temple

Familia! 

Just some other stuff that I didn't include in my group email....

At the MTC copy center they have a little Kiosk where you can order a T-Shirt for your mission. I just ordered mine and I should have it by next P-Day so I'll try and send a picture if I remember. Choir is way fun here! The director is really good, and he has lots of good stories to tell us. We sang a really pretty rendition of the Hymn "Precious Savior, Dear Redeemer" this week for the devotional. Probably just as fun, if not a bit more fun, is our Shower Choir. Pretty much our whole corner of the residence building likes to sing so when we are all in the showers we sing hymns, Disney songs, and whatever else comes up! It's pretty goofy but it's a blast. 

To answer mom's questions: Yeah I got the flip-flops, they are great. Thursdays Saturdays and Sundays are the longest days so I'm getting tired but I'm doing good. I played volleyball this morning and I usually have exercise time at like 7pm so it's throwing me off. My body thinks I should be asleep right now :) Thursdays we do 75min of service at like 6:15am. It's usually like sweeping or cleaning the residence bathrooms so not the most fun jobs. Then we have class right after for like 6ish hours with a break for food. Then we study till 10:30. Saturday is P-Days so we have class from 6-9:15pm. It's just a little hard to be working all day then suddenly sit down right as your body wants to sleep. Then Sundays are literally 13 hours of church. We have Priesthood, District meeting, Sacrament, Doctrine Class 1, Doctrine class 2, Choir, Devotional. Most of those things are more than 2 hours and none are less them 1 :) it's also mostly in English which is quite a trip when you spend all day speaking Spanish. Nothing bad though these days just seem to go slower. 

Calmarse Diligentemente: MTC week 2

Buenos Dias familia y amigos!

Well, the rumors are true. After the first 4 days, time flies past so quickly, it's hard to remember everything that happened this week!

Most of my time this week has been spent on Language study. Espanol es una idioma muy bonita! A lot of people in my district are getting frustrated how they 'struggle' with Spanish, but we've only been here for 10 days now and everyone can pretty fluidly converse in Spanish. Most of the people here are too hard on themselves! I had to memorize Moroni 10: 3-5, The Missionary Purpose, The First Vision, and probably close to 2000 words and phrases. It's a lot of work, but I enjoy it quite a bit. Taking a break and playing some Volleyball helps to keep us focused :)

Speaking of my district, we are super close friends even in this short period of time. We pretty much do everything with the 10 of us. We have so many inside jokes and things, I thought I'd let y'all in on some :) The first one is we shout "Wo-eye-knee" at eachother all the time. One of the Elders in our district lived in China for a bit and that means "Love ya" in Chinese.  I'm not sure when it became a thing but we say it all the time. Another is Calmarse Diligentemente (The title of this email). A translation of this would say "Diligently Chill" or something along those lines. Our Branch President said that in a district meeting this week and we liked it so much we made it our "motto" of sorts. He said it to us because again, some people were being hard on themselves with how much of the language they new and he just said "You aren't expected to know the whole thing by the time you leave The MTC! Diligent study is required to learn the language, yes. You also need to Diligently CHILL. It's fine!" It was a pretty funny but also profound moment. 

We also had our first choir practices. We practiced and sang "Be still, my Soul" for a Tuesday night devotional. The choir director is pretty funny, he tells lots of stories from his mission/life. The assistant choir director is my Uncle Blair's dad! I recognized him from some family stuff we had before and on Tuesday I introduced myself as he asked me to say the opening prayer! Just a funny connection, it really is a small world. 

Some funny language mistakes this week from various missionaries in my district were, "Where is my body" instead of "where is my notebook",  "We want you" Instead of "We want to get to know you", "Canada is a woman" instead of "Canada is better." Never a dull moment in language class!

One of the coolest things this last week was on Sunday. Each Sunday all the missionaries have the opportunity to watch a "Sunday Movie" right before bed. The one they encourage all new missionaries to watch is called "The Character of Christ" It's a talk Elder Bednar gave to the MTC on Christmas Day a few years ago. People say it's a MTC Exclusive thing but If I were you I'd search everywhere for some bootleg version of this talk because it was amazing. Elder Bednar explained some amazing things about how one attribute about the Character of Christ is how he always tuns outward to serve others while our natural inclination is to turn inward and think about ourselves. He shared some heart-wrenching stories about some people that displayed the Character of Christ, and I wish I had the time to recount everything about that talk because it seriously was life changing.

Focus on turning outward and thinking of others first! Selflessness is hard but it is so rewarding to serve others. The Savior was the perfect example of that and we need to identify and take upon us the Character of Christ. 

Los amo a todos! 

Elder Thompson

Fotos: 

1. Our district's makeshift dinner when the Dinner line was an hour long (Mostly provided by Hermana Arnold's suitcase of food and other people Halloween treats)

2.This is Elder Gato, the MTC cat

3. The Elders of our District

4. Everyone in our district

5. The hour long line for Pizza Night

6. My companion and our Substitute Lang. Teacher

 

(Additional info to the family this week)

It really does feel like I've been gone longer than 10 days, mostly just because everyone in our district are super close friends at this point. We have soooo many inside jokes and stuff. Elder Freeman does so much funny stuff, I'll tell you guys one thing that I didn't put in my big email. 

For Espanol practice we're supposed to speak it as much as possible, of course. When we do need to use English we're supposed to ask permission with something like, "Mi permite hablar ingles?". One morning we were super tired and just deliriously getting ready and from the corner of the room we hear in a weird voice "Mi permite..... FART" the 3 of us just yell, "NO NO NO NO" then it happened. I don't know if that will be funny to you guys or not but it was so hilarious in the moment!