First Week at the Provo MTC

The Zone Leaders--Elder Lund and Elder Pipe--Elder Pipe is the nephew of a good friend we had when we lived in Sandy, Utah

Food found in their room vent

Hello All,

So after arriving at the MTC last Wednesday we were all rushed around, sent to a classroom and then waited till everyone in our district arrived. That's about all I can remember from the first day. We learned so much so fast, and were trying to get to know everyone, and start to know our purpose here really fast. All I can remember was that day felt very long even though we were only there for like 9 hours but that was an incredibly long time. But none of us were prepared for the next day. waking up at 6:30 wasn't as bad I thought it would be but spending like 13 hours in one classroom was torture for some of us. Me and my companion for the MTC Elder Pipe struggled a bit. But we made it through till the next day. The third day is said to be the hardest, but we enjoyed it. We all grew spiritually and learned about teaching with spirit and how to help people learn the gospel. We had been doing that all along but the third day was just good, and we taught our first "investigator." He is just a teacher pretending to be a non-member, but he is a really good actor. Some of the Elders and Sisters in our group teach our own teacher pretending to be an investigator. They its like she is not even the teacher, but actually like an investigator. I thought that was cool. Saturday we thought was going to be long, and it was. All of this waking up early studying scriptures and trying to prepare lesson for people is demanding and tiring. But it pays off. I'll talk about Sunday later, but keeping with the whole thing about teaching; Elder Pipe and I have two actual investigators we are teaching. One is a girl from Florida who is visiting her older brother for a while who works in the MTC and is a convert. She has no religious background so it was kinda weird teaching her and being some of the first people to talk to her about religion. Interesting experience, but a good one, are lesson went well. 

Sunday was probably my best Sunday ever. We all had to prepare a talk in my Zone because our branch President decides at random who speaks. So we all wrote talks. it turned out that there was some administrative errors and we needed to share a room for sacrament meeting. We shared with a French Speaking Zone. So we heard the hymns, sacrament prayers, and a talk in French. One sister from our zone spoke and nobody in our district spoke. Sorry for those who dont know the order goes Mission(MTC)-> Zone-> District. we have to districts in our zone. we are all English speaking. The district that was here before us just finished their two weeks in the MTC so they left for their missions this morning at like 3 AM. Anyways it was just good because we learned so much about the gospel in the week that finally coming back to church and just being there and partaking of the sacrament was great. just very spiritual.

Now just for some fun stuff. Our district gets along well. We all kinda lose focus about the same time during blocks of class and personal study so thats nice we can all take a break together. My companion Elder Pipe is from South Jordan Utah and is a cool guy. we get along well and teach well together. There is like no personal time at the end of the day, so that is kinda rough, but oh well. Today we get all day to do personal stuff. we are going to the temple today, but nobody at BYU come okay, we get in trouble if family and friends show up just to see us there haha. 

Sorry no pictures today, because the computers are on straight lock down. I tried plugging in my camera but the computer wont recognize anything.(Note from Elder Lund's Mom--he was able to borrow a cord from a sister missionary that worked for these computers) Oh well I'm tired, but learning so much. We watched some videos about the MTC to help us feel better and less stressed out. One kid in the videos said that the "First few days in the MTC is like drinking out of a fire hydrant, you get some water, but most of it just hurts your face." <----To true!!! but we do learn a lot, but its a lot to take it. the first day it was like everyone was throwing up on us. But its better now. Also Me an my companion have been assigned as Zone Leaders. so this makes us responsible of our zone, which is just our district, so our district leader is in charge of us. But there will be 6 elders and 4 sisters coming Wednesday, and me and my companion are supposed to meet with them the first night, calm them and down and just let them know how to survive. That should be fun. Don't have much besides that. If there are typos sorry! The cursor is weird so if you type in the middle of a word the letter you type just throws of so you are deleting then replacing the next letter. So to fix something I would have to just re-type everything. Which as much as I want to be grammatically correct, its not worth it that much, I apologize.

Good luck to you all 103 of 104 weeks to go.

Elder Lund