Bryson...Elder Grondel entered the MTC October 12th and is having an amazing time, it was very hard to say goodbye but we are so excited for him and his choice to serve he lord we received his first email about a week ago.
Here is his first Email from the MTC:
Hey there family! I miss you guys already! I hug my pillow pets really tight before I go to sleep every night. I kinda hope you guys can feel it too. I have been working my tail off from the moment I got here. We are either walking somewhere on our feet, or we are sitting in classes trying to soak up as much of the language and the gospel lessons from Preach My Gospel as humanly possible. By the end of the day we are SO tired. Are day starts at around 6:30 with wakeup followed by companionship planning session until around 7. Then we have personal study and a companionship prayer until breakfast which starts at 8 or 8:30 depending on the day. After that, we have classes on either language or gospel study. Sometimes we have 1 hour lessons focused on Preach my Gospel with a random MTC teacher, but our classroom times are in 3 hour blocks. One block is teaching an "investagator" (she works for the MTC but acts out the part really well lol) all the companionships in our district teach her for about 15 minutes and when we aren't teaching we are studying and preparing to teach her a second time. The other 3 hour block is class instruction which is either language or lessons... usually both combined, separated by missionary coaching where Brother Perry (Irmao Perry) helps answer questions or looks over our lessons to make sure that we can have the lesson as we teach. Lunch and dinner... personal study time, personal language study... companionship study. These are all the different things that we have going on during the day. Did I tell you guys that on the second day we had to teach a lesson? Yeah, well we did. Catch though... it had to be in Portuguese because she doesn't know any english. Yes, on the second day we had to teach in our new language. We had learned how to pray and bear our testimonies, but we had to teach a full on lesson. We prayed before we went in... really hard! We opened with a prayer asking the Lord to bless Julia (investigator) with patience... lots of patience- muita paciencia and stumbled through the lesson. At the end Elder Atoa bore his testimony and then it was my turn. My heart was pounding. I started to bear my testimony only using the words that we had learned in class, but I really wanted to tell her that our Heavenly Father wants us to be happy during our lives. There was a picture of Christ hanging on the wall behind Julia and when I looked at it I heard this voice in my head say: "Go ahead Elder, tell her." ...?... So I did. The words we had read during class started to come into my mind and I managed to say exactly what I wanted/needed to. "Eu sie que nosso Pai Celestial quera-nos estar alegria durante nossas vidas em esta terra." Wow! The language is not a barrier when we have the Spirit. Pl;anning for our second lesson wasn't so good though. We got bogged down in saying all the right things and started to get frustrated with it... We started to get frustrateted with each other and the next day when we went to give the lesson we crashed and burned hard haha. It looked like my room when I left... yeah, that sad. We reevaluated and figured out how to better prepare. Open with prayer, share our ideas with each other and then let the Spirit direct us. After writing the lesson in english we translated it and tried to memorize the lesson. We taught her about the restoration in our third visit and we did so well. I am so proud of the Spirit that my companion has. He is trying SO hard to pick up this language, but it isn'tcomingto him nearly as fast as he would like. During this third lesson we had our notes on the desk, but I felt prompted to cover them up... So I picked up my Pregar Meu Evangelho and covered our notes. We were going to fly blind and put our faith in Him. I folded the paper and stuck it in my pocket. We went on to have the best lesson we have had so far. Elder Atoa was bearing his testimony at the end and he couldn't find the words he was trying to say. We sat there for about a minute with no one saying anything and Elder Atoa thinking so hard you could almost hear his thoughts... But during that time we could feel the Spirit so stongly and we know that she felt it too. We could feel it even though we couldn't hear it.
Onto some fun stuff now... I LOVE my district. We have so much fun together and we are always smiling and laughing. Elder Atoa and I have a secret handshake, Elder Bell and I rap/sing/high-five like champs together, Elder Wise and I make funny faces during class (We stay focused though, I promise), and guess who is in my district??? Grant Gallinger!! Yeah! what the heck? How awesome is that?
My roomates are awesome and we already have inside jokes. It's awesome. AWESOME! haha. I put this into a letter, but LEXI! Elder Bell can beatbox REALLY well so the other day I laid down a sick flo (I rapped for you that don't know about it). It was dope.
Time is almost up but I LOVE YOU ALL! =D
Hello E. Grondel,
ReplyDeleteI don't know If you will remember me, but I really think that you'll not. I live in Caçador, near Videira, where you served. I'd like to thank you for this blog. I was reading your blog and reading it I felt the desire of serve the Lord stronger, You're the men!
(Perhaps, you'll remember the fact that we met at one priesthood conference in Videira where you asked me If I wear glasses just for fun, or it was seriously and you told me that you only wear 'cause you think that it is fancy)
Regards,
Junior Klaus.