Last Week in the MTC!! -Sorry its Late!!-

Thursday: So today, I learned a little thing about obedience. One of the rules we are expected to follow is to not write letters except on Preparation Day once a week. Usually, this is too much of a problem, except for when I get letters that I've been waiting for on Wednesday night....after my Preparation time has ended. Then I can't write a response until the following Wednesday. This happened last week haha. I got a letter from a friend that I really really really wanted to answer. The purpose behind the rule is so that we don't concentrate on letters we are getting throughout the week, and more on our work. At first I told myself that since I would have a missionary purpose in answering that letter, that it wasn't really breaking the spirit of the rule because I wouldn't be getting away from my work, technically. I was really that if I waited to answer the letter until today, that I would miss out on a lot of things happening with this person. I came to realize that I needed to trust that Heavenly Father would take care of my friend, and that he knew what he was doing. If I broke the rule, and wrote the reply to the letter right away, that wouldn't be showing a whole lot of faith or obedience. So I decided to wait. Definitely was hard though. On another note, we also decided which pokemon each of the missionaries in my district would be if we were pokemon. I was Zapdos, my companion was Dragonite, Sister Fredrickson was Mew, and Sister Ray was Lapras. It's sad, I know haha.
 
Friday: Today, we did something called specific contacting. This means that before we go out and meet people, we pray for inspiration and write down a description of a person that we think we will meet and the message we feel they will need. It gets very specific, for example, my companion and I said we were going to find a short Elder wearing a red tie who is going on a mission somewhere in the States. We really had to have faith that we would find someone like that. Turns out we did! We found an Elder who exactly matched that description and gave him a message. The Sisters in our district had an even more amazing experience though. They said they would find an Elder with a blue tie, dark hair, standing outside of the gym. They went to the gym and found this Elder. They gave him a message about how his family would be blessed while he was on his mission, and he didn't need to worry. He started crying. He said that he had just found out that his mom had cancer and he had really been worrying about it. Their message gave him a lot of comfort. That totally blew my mind when they told us that story.
 
Saturday: Today we taught our investigator named Kristopher. He's the one who has a priest who told him that the mormon missionaries are sent from the devil and the Book of Mormon is a devil's book. Real Christian attitude right? Anyways, we taught him about the Plan of Salvation. Where we came from, why we are here and where we are going after this life. He had trouble with it before and so it was important to help him understand that if he had questions he could ask! He said he really liked how in the Church you can ask questions about anything, without being scolded for it, just like it says you can in James 1:5. We committed him to baptism and he said yes! So awesome.
 
Sunday: Today was a pretty normal Sunday in the MTC. In the devotional at night, there was a Elder from Hungary who played a special musical number on the organ. Best. Organ. Performance. Ever. I didn't know it was humanly possible to move your fingers and your legs in opposite directions at that speed. We gave him a standing ovation afterwards. It was fun haha.
 
Monday: Today we taught Steiner, who is the brother of our other investigator Frederick. He hasn't wanted to be preached to but he said that we could come by and talk with him as long as it wasn't about religion. We agreed to that, and a couple of days ago, we shoveled his driveway and left him a note and pamphlet, just to soften him up a bit =p We asked if he had time to talk today and he let us in to chat, with the condition that it wasn't about religion. That didn't last long. We're missionaries and our whole life is religion, so once he asked us about ourselves, we of course casually brought it up. He said that he really was interested in what we had to say, but he was afraid to change. We told him that everything would be completely up to him and he didn't have to change if he really didn't want to. He agreed to let us teach him the lessons as long as his brother was also there. We, of course, agreed....and invited him to church ha.
 
Tuesday: So last week, Elder Richard G Scott came. This week, it was Elder Dallen H Oaks, another one of the apostles. Not a bad way to finish off the MTC, with two apostles speaking to us. His talk was definitely different from Elder Scott's. He had a very organized, topic by topic talk and Elder Scott didn't even have anything written down. They were both spectacular to hear though. Elder Oaks talked about little things we can do to improve ourselves as representatives of Christ, and it was really interesting to hear how the littlest things can have the biggest effect.
 
So that was this week. I leave for NORWAY on Monday morning!! It's so exciting, and weird to think that I'll be talking to REAL people about all this stuff I've been learning in less then a week! I'm way excited to get back to Europe though, I miss it haha. We have a layover in London too, so I'm stoked to just BE in England again, even if we can't see anyone or leave the airport.
 
If you want to write me anytime after this week, you have to use the Norwegian address which should be on my blog. I'll send it to my sister just in case it isn't, but I'm almost sure I put it on there before I left. In fact, Sami could take the Utah address off now. I'll get a specific street address for where I'll actually be living in Norway once I get there so email I'll have that. The address that is there now is the mission home in Oslo, but we can use that for mail for right now.
 
Anyways, hope everything is awesome for everyone! Next email will be from the other side of the world! Haha great.
 
Love,
Elder Sessions