MTC, Week 6

Hola todas personas!

It's August already. That means that by the end of this month I will be in Argentina preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. CRAZY! I've also been here for 41 days. That's a long time. Only three weeks left. I can do it. Si se puede!

So, the MTC is very routine, I've already told you everything that happens here in my last letters. So instead I'll tell you about some of my lessons this week. Elder Kelly and I have four progressing investigators we are teaching. Here is run down of each of them:

First is Doug (yes, it's weird to teach someone named Doug. And he picked the name just to bug me). We have taught him all the lessons and he is going to be "baptized" tonight. Hooray! My first fake baptism. He is being played by a missionary, which is why it was so easy to get him baptized. When you teach other missionaries they always accept the invation to be baptized. The lesson we taught him this week was all of the commandments (chastity, word of wisdom, tithing, etc). It was honestly a pretty horrible lesson, especially cause we have never taught it before and we didn't practice very well before hand. O well, that's why we are here at the Mistake Training Center (as Elder Kelly calls it).

Another investigator is Thomas. We teach him at the TE (Teacher Evaluation) which means he is a returned missionary and actually knows how investigators act, and does a good job being a fake one. We have only taught him twice because it is really hard to get appointments at the TE. The first time was just the Restoration lesson, which was alright. The second time we went and he hadn't read the Book of Mormon at all. So instead of teaching the Plan of Salvation we just read the introduction of the Book of Mormon and Alma 7:11-12 (probably my favorite verses in the Book of Mormon). It was way spiritual, but I don't know if we will be able to teach him again and get him baptized.

The first two we teach in English. The next two we teach in Spanish. First is Estaban and Armando. They are missionaries that we teach during class time. They are brothers that work on a farm. We taught them the restoration and that's about it. Armando asks a lot of questions so we end up not having a lot of time for the lesson. But it's all good.

The last people we teach are Pepe and Juan. They are missionaries from the district that is fluent in spanish. They are native spanish speakers. So we teach them and don't really understand what they say, but we try to teach them anyway. We've only taught them about God being our loving Heavenly Father, the gospel blessing families, Christ and the atonement, and prophets (both ancient and modern). But they have definitely felt the spirit, even though they are gang members (at least I think that's what they said, it was spanish so I could be wrong).

So that's what I do all week. Teach those people and go to class, with a few other lessons thrown in there. On Saturday we taught the second lesson (plan of salvation) in spanish for the first time. We taught it four times in one day, but never got past our life on earth. We don't really know how to describe the spirit world in spanish yet, so we just spend a lot of time talking about pre-earth life. But we are definitely getting better, which is great.

Gene R. Cook spoke at the devotional on Tuesday. It was pretty awesome, he is a great speaker. He talked about seven things we need to do to recieve and follow the spirit during lessons. Then of Friday we had a Large Group Meeting where we talked about baptizing people. It was really good, it made me want to go right now and start baptizing people, but I guess I probably need to learn spanish first. That might help.

Well, that's all I got time for today. It's been a great week. I'm enjoying the MTC even while I look forward to leaving it. Yo se que la iglesia es verdadero y Jesucristo es el hijo de Dios y nuestro Salvador.

Les Quiero,

Elder Gardner

"Who will join in our crusade? Who will be strong and stand with me? Beyond the barracide is there a world you long to see? Then join in the fight that will give you the right to be free!"