Aug 23 2011 Letter from MTC

Well this last week has been pretty awesome it’s gone by crazy fast and I’ve had a lot of success in teaching. I’ll only go into detail about a couple of the good lessons one of them was a red head lady who knew basically nothing about the church or God or anything so the first time we taught her it was just a jumbled mess and we jumped around a lot so for our second visit we decided that we needed to start with the beginning at lesson 1. So we had it all planned out but it went nothing like planned. We started out by letting her just pretty much talk for 20 minutes then we started lesson one and she asked this; "what if I don’t want God in my life, what if I don’t want to worry about pleasing him all the time." My mind was blown. I never thought I’d hear anybody say that and I was stumped. My companion started talking about something but I zoned out a little and thought about her question. I then felt like I needed to talk about prayer so I brought it up and asked her if we could teach her to pray and why it was important. We told her that if she prayed she could at least find out if there was a God and what he wanted from her and if he wanted her to become closer to Him. It went really well and we had a prayer with her at the end that I think was really good. We will see how it goes the next time we meet with her. The second experience is better. So my companion was getting bloody noses and I kept telling him to go to the doctor because that’s not normal but he wouldn’t listen.. until he went pale and almost passed out. So we took him to the doctor and they gave me a beeper and told me to come back when it went off. The problem was we were supposed to teach our teacher again in about 10 minutes. I went back to class and she told me to just pick someone to teach with me. I asked Elder Wilding if he would be my companion and he agreed but we only had 5 minutes to prepare and we had never taught with each other before. We went in and were a little nervous but it turned out amazing. It was the most powerful lesson we have ever taught and it flowed so smoothly. We began teaching on the plan of salvation and got to the atonement and repentance and she was really curious after we covered the subjects. I sat for a minute before continuing the plan of salvation and felt like we needed to go to baptism which wasn’t part of what we were going to teach her today. I waited for a minute and kind of hesitated but then Elder Wilding looked at me and said to Candice "we would like to talk to you about baptism." It was crazy! I know that it was inspired and that we were meant to take it in that direction. We invited her to be baptized but she said she just couldn’t commit yet so we prayed with her and asked her to really ponder and pray about it before we came back. We teach her again tomorrow so we will see how it goes. But still since I’ve taught that lesson I haven’t had one go as smoothly as that and it was with someone I had never even taught with. Crazy stuff. Well those were probably the highlights of the week. I promise to read the talk you send me and yes I got the cookies and they were AMAZING! Not as good as your homemade ones though.  I love you guys so much and miss you a lot but I’m glad I’m here.