Week 1 - Welcome to the MTC!

Hello friends and family, wie geht es für ihnen? So far the MTC has been pretty busy, as in literally every hour is planned down to the dot. It's a little much at the beginning, but it won't kill me. My companions name is Elder Rosborough and he's from right here in Provo. He's a pretty nice guy, but I'm amazed at how consistently grumpy he manages to look. He says it's the uni-brow. He loves everything history and his memory might just save me here.​

Elder Rosborough

​My district is pretty cool as well. We get along pretty well most of the time, and they all seem like pretty nice guys. I mean, they're missionaries, so how bad can they be?

Elder Seamons being slightly more productive than me.

Me looking fabulous as usual.

Elder Blackner looking nearly as fabulous as me.

Life in the MTC is pretty busy, so we look for any opportunity to celebrate.  For instance, the great day of Cinco e Octo which everyone celebrates on the 5th of October every year.  In case you've forgotten about it, I'll summarize it for you.

On the 5th of October in 1994 the people of Arminia declared war on the octopusses in the waters surrounding the island of Arminia. They aimed their ballistic harpoons into the water and fired until the water was full of the carcasses. This went on so long that they started to sink into the ocean. Seeing this, the Arminians yelled out' "Cinco de Octo!" into the sky in triumph.

To celebrate, our entire branch brought out the excessive amounts of food that our families seem to keep sending us and we shared it with everyone. You can imagine how wild the parties at the MTC get.​

Cinco de Octo.

Meeting with Becky has been hard. (We are done with her now. We meet with our first "investigator" four times and then we get three new ones that we meet with for the rest of our time here. Becky was actually a teacher, and now we will be teaching her and our other two teachers as investigators as well.) She was incredibly quiet and she seemed almost resistant to the spirit. She loved answering our questions with as little information as possible. We could bear our testimonies (in caveman German) and read powerful scriptures and she would say she felt absolutely nothing. We did our best, but it didn't seem like we were making any impact. When we met her as a teacher however, she told us a little about each of our meetings with her. We hadn't had any good reasons or feelings to give the lessons that we did, but we did our best and trusted our gut. She said that we did amazingly well for our first lessons and that she noticed us getting better and bolder each time. I bear my testimony that if you do all that you can and just try your best to listen to what you feel, Heilige Vater will bless us and make our efforts sufficient.

Anyway, for the most part the MTC has been pretty great.​

My beautiful t-shirt that doesn't quite fit.

Nametag official.

Elder Spaulding, signing off.