Week 2:
Hey everyone!
Week 2 at the MTC has been amazing! Ill start with all the questions/comments ive been asked so far:
Birthday: yes I actually haven't even realized my birthday is coming up, ive barely thought about it honestly. Please don't get me too much stuff because then i have to try and figure out how to shove it in my suitcase and take it to New York. If you still want to get me something, send it to the NY address (mom, please send that address in this message).
***New York Rochester Mission
460 Kreag Road
Pittsford, NY 14534-3733
Other people in the MTC: I actually was able to see Sister Davis this week! It was crazy being able to see someone I knew from Washington. She was pretty surprised to see me after 5 years. She looks way different but still super recognizable.
I've also seen a few other people I recognized, one was sister Kang who was in my math class junior year, then I recognized the name "Sister Bowles" and it turns out that sister is related to my gym teacher from last year, Alice Bowles!
And the craziest one, I saw an elder (redhead) during exercise time named Elder Zarbock and is related to the Zarbocks from our ward! It's insane how many people I saw, such a small world.
Are you feeling comfortable with everything?
Yes! Everyone here is amazingly nice and really helpful. I've been adjusting fairly well even though this is a completely new place.
Where is your companion From? Elder Weber is from Idaho and is gonna go to BYU-I after his mission. He (along with elder Barry and Davis) are all going to New York. It's just us 4 from our district leaving to Rochester.
Is your cell phone all figured out? Not yet, I don't have a sim card in it yet so I can't make phone calls/texts.
Are you receiving the packages I've sent you?
Yes! It's been sooooo nice to get them. Even if it's something as small as a single candy bar, receiving a package just brightens up my day. But wait you also mentioned crumbl cookies??? I never got those!
That's so amazing that Aaron got a SOLO to sing during church and he did it so well! You're gonna have to send that video to me if you can, I want to watch it! That little guy could be going places honestly.
Alright, that's just about all the questions I got. Now onto my week. I'm gonna start with last pday since I didn't have a chance to talk about that yet:
We always start our Pdays at 8:30 to go to the temple. It was soooooo amazing to go with such an awesome group of missionaries. We did an endowment session and the video is different, I think it's the most up to date version but it's really interesting and much easier to follow especially since they show more emotion rather than just robots doing their thing.
After the temple we did some laundry and other miscellaneous pday stuff. After dinner we had class at 6pm and that's when pday officially ends. We went straight to class to roleplay taking to a referral. We prepared a lesson on prayer and God's love and had 10 minutes to teach it.
Oh also, it turns out that Elder Davis' dad (another missionary going to NY in my district) went on a mission years ago and marked his scriptures up like crazy! The man had scripture references for everything! The atonement, baptism, repentance, absolutely everything a missionary could need! I borrowed his BoM and marked my scriptures similarly. I've been doing this for the past week and I have some amazing scriptures for every basic doctrine of Christ. Oh also, the preach my gospel has AMAZING scriptures to reference as well! Even for those of you who ARE NOT MISSIONARIES, if you have basic questions or even know someone who has questions about what we believe, the preach my gospel has references for everything and goes in depth in explaining them all. I highly suggest grabbing one. We also talked to the person we were teaching (we don't call them investigators anymore). His name is Tanner and seems like a really nice guy! I'm excited to be able to meet with him more.
Sunday: rumor at the MTC says if you can make it past your first Sunday, you can make it in the mission field. I thought my first half week went really well so I guess I'm good to go! Hahaha. I've been having an absolute blast here, not many issues at all.
We started our day with President Samuelian- he's the most amazing. Most powerful speaker. He talked about the restorstion/first vision and challenged us to memorize it all.
Oh also, before that class, Brother Chesnut (2nd counselor for district 39) pulled me and my companion aside and asked us to serve as technical specialists! Basically we will be teaching the new districts that come here on Wednesday how to use their phones and email their branch President (emailing the branch pres is different than sending regular emails. We don't do it through gmail at all. It's a long process). This will be a weekly assignment on Thursdays.
We had sacrament with our zone which in total was around 50-60 missionaries. We had 2 new branches this week (us and one other branch) and the other 4 branches were leaving this Wednesday! It's a lot of crazy stuff, there were new assignments for everyone in our 2 districts that just came in since everyone else was leaving.
After all that, we went to choir practice. There was about 1200 missionaries there and there's about 350 seats in gen conf. So not all missionaries could go. In fact it was about 1 out of every 4 missionaries could go (side note: I did not find this out on Sunday, but later in the week I did know that I was not invited to go to general conference... kinda sad but oh well no biggie). We sang a brand new song that was created by our choir teacher. It's a combination of a completely brand new song combined with... yknow what, I'm not even going to spoil it. I'm just going to say PLEASE pay attention for when the missionaries start singing. The song is absolutely amazing and I know the spirit helped our choir teacher compose the song. It's so applicable for members who might be struggling with their faith, it gives me the chills just thinking about the lyrics!!
After choir we had a devotional that revolved around David and goliath. We learned some new concepts - the biggest one was that David grabbed 5 smooth stones to use against goliath, and these stones were relatable to the 5 principles of the gospel: faith- repentance- baptism- gift of the holy ghost- endure to the end.
Monday: we started our morning at around 5:30 (not 6:30) because we had to do service from 6:25-7:25. So funny story about that... both the elders and sisters were told (via note to the district leader) to report inside a building next to the vending machines and wait until we were told to do something. What we didn't know was that it was a RESIDENCE building for the SISTERS. Yeah, all the elders got yelled at from a faculty worker frantically running down the hallway. And we were just sooo confused because we didn't know what was going on. She was pretty hysterical and we could barely make out the words "you need to get out now" between everything she was saying. We all kinda thought her reaction was a little much since all we were doing was standing and looking around trying to find someone to tell us what to do. You could tell pretty easily we weren't doing anything maliciously... anyways, so we told them about the note that said elders and sisters report to this building and then we were redirected to another building to go clean... It was pretty funny laughing at their reactions
At 8:30 we had a class called "how to begin teaching" which the absolute biggest point that was drilled into us was not to start immediately teaching about the doctrine of Christ. Get to know them, allow them to realize they can trust you, be their friend and love them.
After that class we met with Tanner, the person we were teaching! We talked a lot about God's love, prayer, and faith. Tanner seemed blown away with the concept of having a personal relationship with an all powerful being, but he seemed excited to try it out.
One of his first questions was "why do Mormons always seem to happy even if things might be rough?" I took a few moments in silence, opened up my bag, and pulled out my scriptures. I asked him to read the second set of words on the spine of my scriptures. He read "the Book of Mormon, another testament of Christ"
I told him THAT is why we are so happy all the time, it's because of what you just read, and I promise that if you take us up on our invitation to read this book and to learn of it's teachings, you will come to understand for yourself why we are as happy as we can be.
I could go on and on about that lesson. For my first time teaching I thought it went very well.
Oh also, during dinner I got an email from the MTC saying my comp and I have another person to teach! Her name is Grace and lives in SLC. She took the discussions during hs but didn't continue with it, but now she's interested again. We will see how that goes!
Tuesday: we started our day in the classroom and our teacher gave us some amaaaaaazing scripture references for Questions people might have. Oh also, on all of the Elder' s desks were post it notes with scriptures attached to them, combined with a little thank you at the bottom. Turns out the Sisters in our district made them for us! They are honestly the nicest people ever. I love my district so much, they do nothing but uplift each other
We met with Grace today! Her biggest need seems to be that she really wants a personal relationship with God- which is amazing because I feel the most comfortable teaching about heavenly father and his love for us. We meet with her again on Thursday, tomorrow we meet with Tanner again - I hope our lessons go well with them both.
Wednesday: today in class we learned how to have legitimate conversations with the people we teach, rather than having a question & answer/interrogation with them. Personally I kinda already knew how to do this, but this isn't common knowledge for everyone so it's good to go over it. We do this by asking simple, open ended questions - this promotes multi-sentence answers rather than a flat yes or no.
After class my comp and I prepared for tanner's lesson later in the day. Last time we invited him to read 1st Nephi 15:1-11 and then pray to know what we talked about earlier was truthful and came from God. Unfortunately he wasn't able to read it. His roommates at BYU encouraged him to read a chapter in alma and he got the 2 scriptures mixed up. We reassured him that he was totally okay and that we are more than happy he was just reading. Turns out he read about repentance and the atonement, which is exactly what we were going to teach him! He already had a solid understanding of the atonement and he also easily accepted the concept of repentance.
After the lesson we got another email from the MTC asking us to take a survey about our lesson with Tanner. Turns out, the MTC has the people we teach take surveys regarding their experience. It asks questions like "how understandable was the message that we shared today?" Or "do you think you will act on the invitations you received and that you will change parts of your life because of what you've learned?"
Anyways, so we were to take this survey from the point of view of tanner, so we could compare answers with the survey he did. We were dead on with every Answer except for 2 of them. Not only that, Tanner had put "4" for every question except for maybe 2 of the responses! I had thought we did well but I didn't think we would've done borderline perfect! Even our teacher in class (he also gets the survey emails to see how we are doing so he knows how to better teach us) emailed us and basically said "dang, well done elders!"
After an amazing lesson we had exercise time and didn't really play competitively, we just kinda hung out and shot hoops.
Thursday: today I woke up involuntarily to my throat absolutely killing me. It was so bad that in the morning I went and made an appointment with the doctor for 4:15 later that day.
After that we had class instruction at 8:30 and we learned about stuff I was already doing on my own! Today was about "if we use scriptural references and have them read it, we need to take it sentence by sentence so they can understand it properly." I knew that I always struggled with comprehending scriptures so I already started doing this with those we were teaching!
After class we taught Grace again! She's super nice and just had a warm spirit. We taught her about repentance and the atonement (similar to tanner yesterday) and she really seemed to have a strong feeling a hopefulness. She felt really comforted with the idea of coming closer to god, so we are trying our best to relate everything back to Him.
After our meeting with Grace, my comp and I finally started our callings as tech specialists! At 1:30 we went to the classrooms of the new districts in our branch and taught them how to send emails to their branch President. It was a lot to explain but we did it fairly well I thought, so that's good!
At 4 I went to the doctor who basically told me he couldn't give me any prescriptions, but he referred me to some medication that could definitely help me out! He referred me to the BYU medical clinic that's about a 5 minute walk from the MTC grounds. My comp and I immediately went and bought the medication I needed. It has been very effective so far in helping calm my throat down! I just have to be sure to drink tons and tons of water...
After buying the medication, my comp and I prepared for our next lesson with Tanner. We decided to teach about the great apostasy and the restoration and then touch on eternal families if we had time. It's definitely a ton of content but so far Tanner has just been flying through with his faith. As I was rereading Joseph Smith history with my comp, I honestly forgot how powerful those verses are. At the end of the lesson we are going to invite him to read JSH 1:11-19. It's a lot of reading but I think he will be able to do it!
We had exercise time in the gym again and this time I played volleyball. A lot of missionaries thought I played on an organized team! I was kinda destroying it haha. I'm definitely not the tallest but I can set/spike the ball pretty well just because I know how to get the ball around people's hands.
Friday: we had class again at 8:30, but we were all kinda late. Our teacher was low-key upset but he's a super nice guy and his love for us shows in literally every minute that he teaches us, so really it was no big deal that he was a little upset with us being 5 minutes late.
That being said, I was super upset today. I found out that my comp and I would no longer be teacher Tanner OR Grace! Apparently we only teach the first 2 lessons with them and then we move on to new people... that made me super bummed out, but I know it's probably for the best we learn how to initiate conversations with as many new people as possible.
Anyways, we did get 2 new people to teach - Jose and Cafe. Jose is a born Catholic from LA and moved to Utah 1.5 years ago. He feels low-key excluded from people who are LDS. Specifically, he said to us "I'm always invited to hang out with them, but when I invite them to hangout with me they become 'too busy.'" His quote reminded me of what it really means to be apart of this church. Are we really only here for ourselves? Why is it that we are willing to put forth the effort for them to join us, but we will never join them? Honestly, within moving to Utah I understand his concerns because I've thought about this exact topic even before my mission. It can be very hard for nonmembers to grow up here since some members in the church can be hard to communicate with.
Anyways, Cafe is from Cali and has only gone to church a few times in his life. He's interested in learning about what we believe about the after life, since his sister recently passed away unexpectedly and he doesn't want to believe she's just gone. I'm really excited to be able to have the opportunity to help them both as much as I can.
We then had exercise time again at around 7:30-8:30. Volleyball has been my go-to in the gym. It's super fun and I think it's funny that I can easily compete against some of the taller/stronger missionaries. I made a few awesome saves by kicking the ball back up in the air, or even blocking a spike that someone was about to hit towards us.
Anyways, that's been my week! I have a few scriptures for you all to read/think about:
-Moroni 10:32 - come unto Christ and be perfected in Him.
-2nd Nephi 2:4-6 - if you follow this scripture, he shall receive the blessings stated in the first sentence of Alma 34:16
-JSH 1:11-19 - The first vision. This is such a powerful scripture. Re read this if you haven't recently!
That's all I have for now, I hope everyone is doing okay, I love you all!
~Elder Breshears
