I've been thinking a lot about getting ready to be in France. It's coming up so soon!! I'm really nervous about being able to speak clearly in the language and being able to contribute to lessons, etc, but I'm really excited!! I feel like I've learned so much here and I've been here for so long now that I'm raring to go, but I can't leave yet!! I think this week I learned so much more about how to effectively teach a lesson, instead of just how to say the words. Sr. Neistadt and I have been working on how to ask good questions and prompt a discussion during our lessons. We're practicing listening with more comprehension so that we can better understand how our investigators are progressing. Also, I'm completely enamoured with the French term for investigator- "ami de l'église" which means "friend of the church". So I'm going to use that from now on :)
I've also been learning a lot about true conversion this week. We frequently use the model of a triangle to describe how we help amis to draw closer to God. The missionaries already have a relationship with God. The missionaries then form a relationship with the ami de l'église. The most crucial side of this triangle is the building of a relationship between the ami and God. The most important part of teaching a lesson is leaving the ami with an invitation or commitment. This is so important because true conversion to God, building that third side of the triangle, happens most frequently when the missionaries aren't there.
We have had some amazing devotionals here at the MTC. We had to do them in chapels all across the MTC campus because they're redoing the floor in the gym. We have 2600 missionaries in the MTC right now, and we're still growing for the summer rush!! So it was a tight squeeze to find rooms for everyone to watch devotional in, but we made it. On Sunday we learned about charity. Charity is so essential in missionary service because our amis will be able to feel the love God has for them through the love of the missionaries. I was reminded that Christ wants all of us to come unto Him, so He is never frustrated with them or their progress. His feelings are not affected by the timing of things because He has all the time in the world! So we need to be happy for the progress our amis make, and love them as best as we can.
We also got to hear about how we can come to know the Lord through adversity in the Tuesday night devotional. The speaker shared stories of adversity from the New Testament and from Church history. I loved when he shared a quote from an early member of the Church, "We came to know God in our extremeties, and the price we paid to know Him was a privilege to pay." I know that a mission can be a really hard experience at times, but I also know that it can be a huge blessing to be able to experience such closeness to God.
Okay! Some fun things to finish out. We took some awesome pictures at the temple on Sunday. The first one is our district, and the second one has two of our roommates in it as well. The last one is just the sisters in our district. Then there are some funny ones from this week :) Sr. Neistadt is from Las Vegas so she had never seen a snail before. We found a bunch of snails outside on the buildings and brought them inside for a "class pet". The first picture is them stuck on the side of the whiteboard. Our teacher was not amused. She made us go bring them outside and Sr. Neistadt was really disappointed. We still check on them everyday. Some of them are in the same place but a couple of them are more adventurous and have moved around. The last picture is one of Frère Taua and a drawing the elders did of him. He plays football for BYU so we all think he's pretty cool.
Okay, that's about it!! I love you all, and love hearing from you, à plus!!
No comments:
Post a Comment