Possibly Insightful Ramblings

It's hard to believe that we have been here for a whole transfer today! That was exciting to realize. Also, our new Russian districts are coming in today! I probably will not get to meet most of them until tonight, but I'm pretty excited about that. It is kind of hard to believe that we are now at the point that our olders were at when we entered and that are new districts are going to be as impressed with our Russian as we were with our older districts. We got our Russian nametags yesterday! We are not supposed to wear them in the MTC, just so everybody can at least read your last name in English, but we were super excited to receive them. Getting those made Ukraine and Russian seem that much more real. I cannot believe that we have less than three weeks left here before Ukraine. That has really been motivating me to work harder so I can learn as much as I can before entering the field. It is humbling to realize how soon I will be in a foreign country speaking a different l...

We received these photos yesterday from Sharisa.   Now we have the requisite photos of the missionaries with the MTC wall map!   Yeah!

My district hit our MTC half-way mark this past week. In honor of the day, the mother of one of our elders (who is a professional baker) sent us one of the most elaborate cakes I've ever seen. It had a caramel/frosting message on the top, and it was quite delicious. It was definitely exciting to see half of the cake disappear within 30 seconds of us digging into it. Elder Oaks came and spoke to us last night. He focused on teaching with the Spirit and how we simply CANNOT teach unless we have the Spirit with us. He emphasized the Sacrament as a key for having the Spirit in our lives. The Sacrament is not something we simply do every Sunday, but it is something that needs to be proceeded by much forethought and repentance in the days leading up to it. I think all of us who heard that talk were inspired to take the Sacrament more seriously so that we can have the Spirit more fully in our lives. Ashley Kingery came into the MTC last Wednesday! She lives on my floor, so we ge...

March 14, 2012 Happy Pi Day!  Four Weeks Out! In the MTC you kind of forget about everything else going on in the outside world. Including daylight savings time. None of us had any idea that it was daylight savings time until about 9:45 Saturday night when they came over the intercom and informed us that we had to move our clocks ahead. That was a terrible realization, but we all survived. The other day in class, one of my teachers was talking to us about service. The people of Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics etc. don't really understand the concept of service - they think you must have some ulterior motive because nobody would just do something nice like that. He shared a story where he and his companion were in the community kitchen of this huge apartment complex where they weren't having too much success and they just started doing people's dishes. There was a huge uproar in the room - people were yelling and trying to stop these Americans from doing their dis...

Our older Russian districts left this week, which means that we're the “old, experienced” ones now. It was so exciting to see them go - they were so fired up to be going out to Russia and Ukraine to actually put in to practice what they've been training for for 12 weeks. That fired me up as well, and I'm excited to join them out there in six weeks. It's definitely a little different not having them around. My branch lost about 20 people, so now we only have about 20 left. The hallways of the Russian building and residence also seem a little empty. And apparently the districts that were supposed to come in on March 14 (like I was originally) got moved back two weeks so they can do the same pilot program we're doing. So we get the laundry room and gym to ourselves for a little while. It's been so incredible to see the improvement we've all experienced in Russian. There's no way we're doing this alone. I have no doubt that the gift of tongues is rea...

Wow, so there's so much to write. I feel this way every night as I'm about to write in my journal - there are like a million things to say because so much happened but I never know where to start because the day felt like a week. But everything's going great! Last night I attended my second Tuesday devotional. This time we were not late for choir practice, so we were able to sing in the choir. Which was wonderful, because we were singing "Come, Thou Found of Every Blessing." As we had rehearsal before the devotional, I noticed a man using the "dentist mirror" thing to check underneath the chairs on the floor. Due to the insight from Steven, I knew that meant we would be having a general authority for that evening's speaker. Then, just before the meeting as we were singing hymns, the director stood and told us that it was not appropriate in this setting for us to make noise if we were going to sing our favorite hymn or if our "favorite spe...

The MTC is pretty great! We have seven missionaries in my district. There are four sisters and three elders. We did have another elder from Costa Rica, but he is a linguistic genius (he knows Spanish, English, German, a "little" Italian and Russian). His one month of tutored Russian at home allowed him to advance to the older district who is leaving to Ukraine in two weeks. So that's exciting for him, but the rest of us are definitely grateful for the next 8 weeks - there's a lot to learn in the Russian language.   Russian is hard, but it's a lot of fun. On our third day here, they had us teach a half hour lesson in Russian to an "investigator." Our lesson ended up being only about fifteen minutes, but it was in Russian! We had to read a lot of the Russian from out notes, but I was able to bear my testimony at the end in Russian and the Spirit was so strong. It was really neat to share my testimony in a foreign language. Since that ti...