Week 2 - "You get to drink from the FIRE hose!"

"Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in my house; and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of Hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it." - 3 Nephi 24:10

I've been feeling that scripture this week.

So I was debating starting this email using a quote from Nick Fury in The Avengers: "I'm asking you: What are you prepared to do?" because I wanted to talk about preparation for the MTC in case any of you reading this haven't served a mission yet, and I'll still touch on that to start, but I ultimately decided to go with this quote from UHF (which is one of the weirdest movies ever--I don't necessarily recommend it).

On the third of December I wondered what I would tell someone who was preparing to enter the MTC to do. This is my definitive list so far:

• Gain a testimony. I've seen people come into the MTC without a firm one, and it doesn't seem like it's a fun experience. If you don't have one, pray to the Lord that he will give you one and then be as obedient as you can to the commandments he has given you. He will help you gain a testimony of the truth by the power of the Holy Ghost. You will feel his influence as you strive to be obedient to those things Heavenly Father has asked you and all of us to do.
• Read, understand and memorize important scriptures. When I got my call packet, it told me to read the Book of Mormon at least once all the way through before I left, no matter how recently I had finished it. I worked out that if I read about 8 pages a day, I could manage it, so that's what I did (I slacked off for a few days before I entered the MTC, so I didn't quite make it. I should finish today or tomorrow -- despite this being a place where you study the gospel, you don't actually get a lot of time to just feast on the scriptures and revel in that experience. Everything you do is meant to have a purpose. So if you think you'll become familiar with the scriptures in the MTC, you will to a degree, but you won't really have time to do it in full [Side note to this side note: I've learned since coming here that native-language speakers are here for 3 weeks, those who need to learn a new language in their native alphabet are here for 6 weeks, and those who need to learn a new language in a new alphabet are here for 9 weeks -- think Russian, Mandarin, etc.]). Doing that exercise, and reading through the Book of Mormon so quickly, I came to appreciate reading it from a macro level, as one long narrative, and there were some great things I learned from that. But when you study in the MTC, in my experience, you tend to study things more closely. My mom gave me some advice she learned from her first week in the MTC: "Study your scriptures like you're looking for your contact lens". That's definitely how they do it here. Every word is treated as being important and intentional, and we've done some great exercises where we read a few verses as a district, stop to summarize and analyze them, and then continue to read. Reading the scriptures so closely has allowed me to understand them in a new way, a way that will be useful for me as I teach them, I think. Anyway, as far as the memorizing goes, I've noticed that having scriptures I'm familiar with at my fingertips has been very, very useful as I've taught lessons. For instance, an "investigator" said she always thought God would bless us if we were just good people, and that we didn't need to do very specific things, like the church's ordinances, to get those blessings. Because I learned it and read it over and over again, and probably because the spirit was available, 1 Nephi 3:7 jumped to mind, and I read it to her and explained that the Lord does ask us to do things, but he doesn't ask us to do things that are impossible. I think the Lord honors the efforts we put in to be prepared, and so if you're preparing for a mission, if I were you, I would read and ponder your scriptures diligently and take note of the verses that pop out at you or seem significant. Write those down, prioritize, and start memorizing them. It will help you so much when you are teaching.
• If you can, do something to practice missionary work -- do splits with the missionaries, invite a friend to church or to meet with the missionaries, or whatever. You'll start to understand more what being a missionary is like and what it's about, and that will help you be more prepared when you enter the MTC.
• Read Preach My Gospel. I didn't go through the whole volume before I entered the MTC, and I'm regretting not doing that. I imagine how I feel is sort of like how people who are unfamiliar with the scriptures feel when they enter the MTC, only I would guess that feels worse. There's a lot of great information and discussion in there, and being familiar with it will be immensely helpful to you as you come to the MTC to learn.

Regardless of how much you prepare yourself, however, no one is truly ready for a mission before they have been set apart as a missionary. It is my experience that if you have prepared, that's when the power comes.

OK, so now to the actual email. There's a bunch of stuff that's happened this week, so I'm not sure where to start. I guess I'll send another email if I realize I left something out.

First, my companion and I committed our first TRC (that's Teaching Resource Center) investigator (or "friend of the church," as they apparently want us to call them now) to baptism! It was great. We taught Andrew lessons 1-3 from Preach My Gospel, and we asked him if baptism was something he'd be interested in, and when he said yes, we invited him to be baptized on Jan. 26. (Side note: I didn't realize why we as missionaries focus so much on baptism until one of the workshops we did this week. Read 2 Nephi 31:16-18 and pay particular attention to the first sentence of verse 18 and where it is in the timeline of conversion [hint: There's a path, and there's a gate. We have to enter in by the gate to get on the path, and we all need to be on the path]). But lest you see this as a great achievement, let me just make sure you understand: My companion and I are basically certain he's a member. We found him during a contacting activity, and when we went to the next contacting activity, he was there again (some people sign up to be people the missionaries teach over and over again), plus he had a CTR ring on his finger during one of our lessons, and I think it was even in the Cyrillic alphabet, so he was probably a return missionary. At the end of our last lesson he said we were awesome and prayed that we could continue to learn to be good missionaries. So as cool as it would be, no real conversions yet, as far as I know.

The next TRC person we taught was Michael. He was an agnostic who just wanted to learn more about different religions and wanted to know about our church. In our second and last lesson with him we committed him to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it. So that was good.

In our second finding activity, which took place on Saturday, we met Kalli. She was reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban when we walked up to her, and we found out she's got a bachelor's degree in English, too, so she and I had a lot to talk about (I feel bad for Elder Lambert: She and I talking probably made up a good 80 percent of the conversation). She grew up in a home with a nonmember dad and a pretty strict, untrusting member mother, and she felt like she was made to feel like she didn't belong at church by the young women (and possibly the young women leaders). I talked to her in our first contact about how the church is a hospital for sick people, not a museum to display perfect people, and sometimes people in the church don't understand that, so they treat people unkindly. She ended our contact with a question: "Why do people just have to worship in one place and in one way? Why is there one church? Why can't people just find what makes them comfortable and confident/settled?" or something along those lines. So we decided to teach her lesson 1, with a specific focus on how the gospel blesses families and the Great Apostasy and Restoration. When we got to the lesson though, we ended up spending all our time on the first two points: God is Our Loving Heavenly Father and The Gospel Blesses Families. I wasn't sure it went well, because we didn't get around to addressing the question she asked, but here they have you do these surveys where your investigator answers a set of questions, and then you answer the questions as though you were the investigator (questions like "How was your day before meeting with the missionaries?" "Do you feel this lesson has brought you closer to Christ?" and "To what degree do you feel like what we discussed was specifically for you?"), trying to express your perception of how they felt. The survey came back and indicated she really was affected by it, and it made a difference for her. Hopefully when we get to teach her again tomorrow we'll be able to answer that initial question, but I'm glad that what we discussed helped her. My companion and I pray that the spirit will be with us before every lesson we teach, and I think his presence is really wthat brings us success.

So like I said, we do these different types of scripture study, and I wanted to share an insight I had about a passage in Ether that one of my teachers really liked, and that I like, too. This is what I wrote in my journal about the experience: "During class I shared an insight about Ether w/our district. Ether 12:7 teaches, 'For it was by faith that Christ showed himself into our fathers, after he had risen from the dead; and he showed not himself unto them until after they had faith in him; wherefore, it must needs be that some had faith in him, for he showed himself not unto the world.' For some reason when I read that I was thinking about the 12 apostles and the events directly following the Savior's resurrection, and it made me wonder: Is this a principle that applied to then and the Savior's other disciples in Israel and the surrounding areas after his death and resurrection? Because if it is, you begin to wonder about when Jesus' disciples had faith in him such that they began to see him. You think of the apostles, to whom he appeared all at once (with the exception of Thomas the first time), but they weren't the first to see him. You think of his disciples on the road to Emmaus, to whom he opened up the scriptures, and whom he taught about himself. Before he expounded the teachings of the scriptures they did not recognize him. But after he had expounded the scriptures, an activity we know has the ability to grow one's faith, they saw him and recognized him for who he was. But they were not the first to see him either. No, it was Mary Magdalene, who saw the empty tomb, who asked the man whom she supposed was the gardener where the body had been taken and who, if she needed anything at all to light her faith, needed only the word "Mary" to recognize that it was Jesus to whom she was speaking. Assuming that what we are taught in Ether is a true and universal principle, her faith in Jesus Christ was strong enough [even after his death] that she was the first to see him as the resurrected Lord, and it appears that her testimony was the one that spurred Jesus' other disciples and apostles to believe and have faith that he had been resurrected and yet lived."

There were two other insights I wanted to share: One from me and one from one of the sisters in my district, Sister Cameron. We did an activity where we expressed a concern we had, and then we asked ourselves how Christ would speak to our concern using the plan of salvation. My concern was that, even though I felt I had the spirit when I taught our new investigator, Kalli, we hadn't said the right things to her (this was before I took the survey). I thought about what Christ would say to that, and what I wrote was essentially that I did teach by the spirit, and that he gave agency to man for a reason, and it doesn't matter how well I teach by the spirit -- because of agency, some people may choose to reject me, and that is Christ's very experience: He did everything, he performed the Atonement, to save us, and some people aren't interested in that assistance. Elder Pollan said something very interesting. He said Christ was a perfect person, and he did everything perfectly, and even he didn't have a 100% conversion rate. We can do everything that we are asked to do and directed to do y the spirit, but people can still choose not to accept our message. That's part of agency, and agency is part of the plan.

Sister Cameron had a wonderful insight about a verse in 3 Nephi. In chapter 18 he institutes the Sacrament, and he says, "This shall ye do in remembrance of my body, which I have shown unto you." Sister Cameron pointed out that so often we think of the Sacrament as an emblem of Christ's death, but when he showed himself unto the Nephites and taught them to administer the Sacrament, he was alive. He was in a resurrected, glorified body, and that was the body that he showed unto them, the body that they knew to take the Sacrament in remembrance of. For them, the Sacrament, as well as a reminder that Christ died for them, must have been a reminder that he lived. I thought that was a really cool insight.

I'm out of time for this week. Thanks for the packages (the popcorn, the donuts, and other assorted goodies), and the letters. If I have time later tonight I'll try to respond to as many as I can personally. You're all the best! Thanks for writing, and keep doing it. I like to be involved in your lives.

Elder Davis