11 Aug 2018: I think I discovered the purpose to the MTC

Elder Johnson, the infamous elder who kicked the volleyball into his face.
He is from Alaska, serving in Minnesota

11 August 2018

Hola mi familia y mis amigos!

Elder Beadle and me, he is going to BYU after the mission, so
hopefully we'll be able to see each other

Ha sido una buena semana! Yesterday we got our travel plans, which was super exciting! Your favorite missionary (I'd like to hope (: ) is going to be on a shuttle bus to Las Vegas on August 22nd at 9:30 in the morning! Elder Cluff and I are the last to leave from our district, and the only ones not flying either, ha ha. As for the title of this letter, I have figured out the purpose of the MTC. It is to get you as pumped to go out to the field as possible. They do this by 10 hour study days, repetitive food, etc. I love it, but boy am I getting antsy to get out to the field, ha ha.

This week involved a lot more goodbyes, to some elders that I got really close to. Two districts from our branch departed for el campo this week, and it was sad to see them go, but super exciting for them to go out to their fields of labor! 

Elder Bastidas stealing my phone with Hermanas Polepoi & Severs, Elders Stewart, Thomas, and Rowell

Sunday was a pretty good day! It was fast Sunday, which made it a bit longer than usual, but fue muy bien! We had a mission conference on the importance of the scriptures, which was very enlightening for me! My favorite part was when Sister Martino, the MTC president's wife, gave her talk. She was super funny, called Elder David A. Bednar, an Apostle of the Lord, cute. She was a lot of fun to listen to! Our devotional that night was given by Jenny Oaks Baker, who is the daughter of President Oaks, one of our General Authorities. She is also a world renowned violinist. Her family is literally a reincarnation of the Von Trapp family singers, only with strings. Her family played for us a bunch and it was so awesome! They played a killer arrangement of "Abide With Me", and many others. It was great to have a music centered devotional. That night Elder Cluff and I watched the film "Recognizing the Spirit", which is a talk given by Elder David Bednar for an MTC Devotional about ten years ago. Spiritual thought of the day: Never postpone spiritual promptings, and don't worry if it is from the Spirit or from you, if it prompts to do good, then it is from God. Plain and Simple.

Elder Rowell and me. He is now in El Salvador.

Monday was pretty average, we got observed by some high up language department people in class in the morning, then we had a new TRC person named Guisela in the evening. She is from El Salvador, and of the three that we have taught, she was the hardest to understand! She was super nice and even helped me with my Spanish! At the end of the lesson, we were in prime position to give her a Book of Mormon, but we didn't have any to give her! Oh well, the lesson still went really well.

Tuesday we had another devotional, this time given by the General Relief Society President Jean B. Bingham. She gave a talk about spiritual patterns, which was really interesting. We got to sing "Lead Kindly Light" for her as an MTC Choir. Earlier that day we played a really fun game of sand volleyball, which ended with one of the Elders kicking the ball, which subsequently hit him in the face! The entire court was on the sand, dying of laughter for five straight minutes! HA! I guess you had to be there. We also found out that we had inadvertently taught Guisela a tidbit of false doctrine, because of the language barrier. We accidentally agreed with her when she said that the Apostle Paul wasn't an Apostle, because we didn't know who "Pablo" was, yeesh. 

Wednesday we had a Skype TRC with a member living in Peru! That was cool, except for the fact that he spoke super fast, and we didn't have much time to prepare for the lesson. That night we had a lesson we had a member present, which was awesome. He was a returned missionary who served in Chile. He gave an awesome testimony on the Book of Mormon. We got two new districts in our zone, which was awesome! Other than that we had a workshop about member missionary work.

Elder Bastidas and me. He is in El Salvador, and after
the mission will be working on building his Financial
Advising business that he has already started.

Thursday we had our last TRC, which was kinda sad, because I do enjoy them, even thought they are hard. We had a conference with our teacher, Hermana Theobald, about our TRCs. I still need to work on sharing the time with my companion. It's hard because we are on two starkly different levels with the language, so I try to trade off with Elder Cluff, who does really, really well with bearing his testimony in Spanish, but struggles with answering the questions. I struggle a lot too, I am no where near fluency, but even so its hard to trade off in a lesson, when you have two different levels of fluency between the two missionaries. Hopefully I will get better at that. I feel really bad when I am talking because I feel like I ramble, and kinda hog the time, but most of the time, I just try to say what is in my head, which is a struggle when you don't know the language.

Yesterday, the only thing that happened was getting the travel plans. There really wasn't anything other than that.

Smoke from the wildfires that have been happening out here.
I have literally had to brush ash off of tables so I could study
off of them!

Today we got to go to the temple this morning, which was awesome! We got the temple breakfast in the cafeteria in the basement of the temple, which was AMAZING! It was great to have food from the outside world, and celestial food at that, since we were in the temple, ha ha.

I am available to email until 6 MST tonight! I would love to hear from you all! I will be responding to the rest of the emails you all sent me as well.

Pictures to come!

Your faithful missionary,

Elder Lovell

Elder Stewart and me. He is in Ecuador, and is a
fantastic artist!