Last Week in the Empty Sea

Well, it is a great feeling to know that I have almost survived my time here down south at the Empty Sea. Flight plans have arrived and I will be out of here on Monday.

February has been great so far...

On Thursday the 2nd we had some fun in the evening. One of the elders received 136 odd ties from his brother. It was pretty entertaining to look at them all.

On Friday Elder Burr, Lynch, and I went and taught Sister Keith aka "Nelly the investigator" through Lehi's Dream. We mostly focused on this life and it was amazing. She learned a lot and the spirit was constantly being felt throughout the lesson. We were all really happy about how well it went. Later on in class we got to call Brother Newman on Sister Priddis' phone to practice following up on contacts and such. It was a pretty funny sight. My cough has been getting better. I went to the doctor and he is letting me go to Latvia, I am just supposed to take an inhaler if I need it to keep my airway open. Sister Huntington left today. We knew that she was leaving, but didn't think it would be until tomorrow. She was notified at lunch that she'd be leaving for the airport in a half hour. Luckily she was all packed. She wrote us later on in the week. She is doing well and she is happy. As a zone we are all doing well. The sisters are all getting along great; there is definitely a different spirit in our residency hall now. This experience has shown me how important it is to be worthy to do missionary work.

On Friday the elders were quite "broken" as we call it. We are all getting cabin fever and the cabin fever of Friday night included them singing Spice Girls and then not remembering it two minutes later. Luckily I will always remember it for them.
Saturday during class we were all falling asleep so Sister P took us out into the cold to do some contacting. We'd switch off having two of us contact and then the other would translate into English. We had a lot of fun doing this and some of the translations were pretty ridiculous (in a good way though- just fixing sentences so that they'd be correct).
On Sunday I gained a testimony of bringing pillows to meetings. Fast Sundays are mission conferences in the MTC so you get to sit for two hours on the hard bleacher seats and then have more meetings to follow. Our district decided to bring our pillows to sit on. This kept us all awake while the MTC presidency and their wives spoke. The biggest thing that the Spirit taught me in that meeting was that I just need to relax and make sure that I am happy and then I'll be doing what is right. Testimony meeting today was really spectacular. All of my district ending up bearing our testimonies and the Spirit was very powerful. When we weren't in meetings we worked on our Epistle of the Latvians, also known as our MTC advice to future Latvian missionaries set up in chapters, verses, and even includes scriptural cross references. Elder Lynch is quite the master at Bible speak, it is a hilariously amazing epistle.

On Monday night we all wanted to shoot ourselves. We had a completely vacuous and dull common sense meeting about health and safety. This meeting lasted almost two hours. Just boil anything you eat for about 6 minutes and you will be fine. Luckily our last LGM made up for the awfulness of the health and safety meeting. The LGM was about finding people to teach. I enjoyed hearing everyone's comments and learning the importance of talking to everyone that we come in contact with and quickly testifying of the restoration because that is what sets us apart. Service was good today as well. I cleaned with the two other sisters in our zone (Hall from Farmington, UT and Kennach from OR). They are pretty quiet but we got a lot done (sweeping, vacuuming, mopping, etc.).

Tuesday the 8th was AMAΖΙΝG. In the morning we had Brother Snyder come in and teach us about the relationship between the Book of Mormon and the Bible. I learned so much. This lesson is how I thought all teaching in the MTC was going to be like. I will try to quickly sum it up. Both the Bible and the BOM contain the fullness of the gospel (check the BoM intro). The two were made for different purposes though. The Bible came after the church and the BoM came before the Restoration as it was to gather Israel and bring people to the truth. This is why we should use the BoM as missionaries to prove the truthfulness of the Bible. Moroni's intro, Ezra Taft Benson, DC 18:4, 1 Nephi 15:14 all tell about the same 3 purposes of the BoM. Matt 16:13-18 the rock is revelation. We may see but it is only in believing that we are saved.

Following Brother Snyder we had our lesson with Brother Vehawn, aka Vytas. He threw us a curve ball saying that his family didn't want him to be baptized. After a moment of befuddlement we abandoned the ship of our planned lesson and left only the parts that could apply to him and this trial, which were conveniently fasting and reading the scriptures. The lesson was great and you could feel the Holy Ghost testify as we were earnestly concerned for Vytas. We will all miss Brother Vehawn. We took some pictures with him and talked for a while after our lesson.

Yesterday (being Wednesday) I saw Chris Teuscher and Cade Cloward. Both are doing well although sick of the MTC. Japanese is really hard for Cade, but he says that he likes it. Elder Burr and I taught a great lesson in the TRC. We (by we I mean I) were really struggling with it earlier because I wasn't fully understanding all of the symbolism in Alma 32 on faith, the seed, and the tree it becomes. Luckily we got it all figured out in companionship study. The seed is a truth about God and we place it in our hearts, where we feel the Spirit and not in our heads, where knowledge is. We do the basics to grow our seed and it becomes the tree of our testimony. From this testimony (and remember that faith is action) we receive fruit- fruit which is eternal life. We taught this in our lesson and it was amazing. We asked great questions and were constantly testifying so the Spirit was there. We applied the lesson to them and showed them how they could gain testimonies of truths that they were unsure of.

It is the most wonderful adventure, a mission.

I love you all (and will be talking to some of you possibly soon). This church is the Church that Christ founded. God is our Heavenly Father and He loves us. He has prepared everything that we need to succeed in this life.

Love,
Sister Lindstrom