Week 6: feito. Ola! Como voces estao!? Eu estou bom e eu estou animado estar aqui em o CTM (MTC).
Another week done and it flew by like no other. Some days it still feels like I am only in my second or third week, but I am learning yet still have a bunch to learn. I also added some new fruit stickers to the back of my nametag! haha one new one is: Banana Coliman Gold from Mexico, and the other is: a Dole one that says FoodDay.org Eat Real!. Yeahh pretty pathetic yes I know.. but that makes seven!
There is quite a bit to talk about from this last week as a ton has happened but some very important stuff so please take your time reading this.
This past weekend we had General Conference (which is when all of our church leaders including the Prophet (President of the church) and all the Apostles are in Salt Lake City and speak to us (a large congregation in a very large building, as well as broadcasted on TV and online to the rest of the world) about pretty much anything! It's a great oppurtunity to hear what they have to say to us, what we need to do, inspirational messages, etc.). I think it would take too long to write all my notes or even a summary of what I wrote, to you all so I will try to keep it relatively short. I like hanging up quotes in my dorm room so I added some good ones to my wall that I heard from conference. I'll just give you all the ones I really liked:
"Do the right thing at the right time with no delay." -Jose L. Alonso (quorum of the 70)
"You matter to Him." -Thomas S. Monson (prophet/president of the church)
"What time we have, we must use it wisely." -Ian S. Ardern (quorum of the 70)
"When a time for a decision has arrived, a time for preparation has past." -Thomas S. Monson (prophet/president of the church)
"Seek ye diligently and ye shall find me..." -(D&C 88:63)
"Fear thou not...for I am with thee" -(Isaiah 41:10)
"Your eternal destiny will not depend on chance, but on choice." -Randall K. Bennet (quorum of the 70)
"Trust in the Lord in all thine heart...In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." -Proverbs 3:5-6
Some other good points to make:
Boyd K. Packer's talk about the importance opf families and how it is central to God's plan and to have a loving family is one of the greatest blessings we can have.
Carl B. Cook spoke about how Pres. monson taught him to look up, but that we also need to step up as well
Barbara Thompson spoke about personal revelation and how important it is to ask in faith and "these things shall be made known..." (1 Nephi)
Dieder F. Uchdorf spoke about the church welfare program and how we need to take advantage of it as well as be an example and help our neighbors and friends with anything they need, be there for eachother but also to work through our hard times.
Again, there was so much more but I really liked these and felt that they are important to us as people.
Something else exciting happend this week as well. Yesterday we had a Brazilian magazine "Veja" come in and interview and take pictures of our class! The magazine is the 4th largest magazine in the WORLD. It is the equivilent to TIME magazine here! The Church picked our class out of the hundreds of brazilian missionaries here in the MTC to interview and observe. The guys from the magazine were way cool and spoke good Portuguese. They were there for about 45 min (as they had to continue the tour of the rest of the MTC) and took literally 1000 pictires of us haha They were writing about kind of how our church does missionary stuff and other stuff about the church so it was cool to have them come in. The day or so before they came in to interview us, the guy who is head of chruch operations said that we had to represent our church, be careful of our responses, etc. It went well and it was amazing when the church operations guy came in to our class Sunday night to let us know about all this and said "yeah so you guys, you 11, are representing the church for this magazine, I don't know why they were inspired to pick you but they did so you should be very proud of this opportunity...no pressure" hahaha
I am still playing futebol (that's a given haha), oh! A guy in our district got his visa so he left earlier today to head down to the Sao Paulo MTC in Brazil. We have been hearing of a couple more people getting visas so it seems like who ever was sleeping in the travil office here has either woken up or got fired haha but at least some people are going so we do know it is possible haha
I am having an awesome time and learning so much and continuing to learn more then I ever knew I could. Thank you all for your support! also, MLB Playoffs are happening sooo...updates? hahaha
Elder Spencer Miller
