Exciting News From the MTC!

We were excited and surprised to receive a phone call from Eliza on Thursday.  She was instructed to call home and let us know her great news!  
Eliza's Mom

January 4, 2013

Hello, all!

 

For those who didn't know, I got some exciting news yesterday. I'm heading out from the MTC on January 15 to Florida! I will be staying with my district in the Intermediate class until I leave, which will be really nice, and I'll be one of 14 going to my mission on the 15th. Also, Florida Fort Lauderdale is the top baptizing mission in North America! So exciting, and I hope we'll be able to keep it up for the next year and a half.

 

I'm probably going to be jumping around a lot in this email, so bear with me. Starting off with some general MTC info/stuff...

 

Our class has two investigators: Jose, who we've been teaching for a couple of weeks, and Gloria, who we just started teaching yesterday. It's hard, scary, and exhilarating to teach them (and they don't tell you until like the third week that when you teach a lesson you don't have to cover all of the principles in one of the lessons in Preach My Gospel!). Also, Gloria and Jose are our main teachers, Hermana Van Vliet and Hermano Florence. We didn't have Hermano Florence as a teacher until we'd been teaching him as Jose for two weeks, which was weird. And for the past week and a half, we've been having lots and lots of substitutes, because Hermana Van Vliet went to visit family over Christmas. We've covered a lot of material several times, but we've learned worthwhile things from each teacher (Hermano Anderson, Hermano Walton, Hermano Johnson, Hermano Litzenberger, Hermano Busath, and Hermana Jeanfreau have all come in...)

 

This week at the MTC we've had what we call the plague. It's an intense intestinal flu that spread like wildfire all over the MTC. It was at one point on every floor of the residences, and we don't really know how people got infected or avoided it. Fortunately, it only lasted about 24 hours for each person, although some people had to go to the hospital for dehydration issues.

 

Also, it's been cold! I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but our room in the Residence Halls doesn't have a functioning heater, so we could never get it above 66 degrees. Using some skillz I picked up from Mom and Marta, I was able to fasten a curtain around the window with bobby pins and safety pins, and now we can usually keep the room at 69. Also, the weather for today was crazy. High of 20, low of -8. We walked all the way to the temple during the coldest part of the morning. Brrr!

 

Okay, now some things I've learned this week. One of the speakers at our Fireside on Sunday night, Brother Durrant, said, "We don't think we're so much, but we know in the name of Jesus Christ we're everything." I thought that was way cool, and very true. In another devotional we watched (from last year, recorded), Elder Bednar talked about how even when Christ was having the worst times of his life he turned outward, helping others, instead of being selfish or using his power to help himself. Whoa. A later Elder Bednar devotional told us that we should look to God when things go well or we experience success, and look inward when things go wrong, to see what we did incorrectly, instead of being self-congratulatory or self-pitying.

 

I've kind of become an Elder Bednar fangirl, BTW. In the later devotional that we watched, he talked about becoming a missionary, not just serving a mission. That's what I'm aspiring to do. I learned a ton more, but I'm running out of time, so it'll have to wait. I love you all!

 

<3

Hermana Houghton