Hey famiglia!
Things have settled down now that I'm a 2 week veteran at the MTC. I saw Elder Taylor Polatis from St. George Utah!! I don't know if you remember him but we played soccer together. I didn't have my camera on me though so no picture with him sadly, but if you remember what he looks like from Bloomington Elementary School, he looks exactly the same except for he is super tall. I'll try to find him again before he leaves. Tough news about the surgery for Reece, tell them to give you an awesome scar to show off. Robby focus with that kicking man, it's incredibly easy to mess up big time if you do one little thing wrong. That sounds like it could apply to the gospel, I think I'll use that comparison in one of my lessons. So I give two- one hour long lessons a week and I've become pretty good at it so teaching certainly isn't nerve racking anymore. Being District Leader has its ups and downs. The Up side: I get to be the final decision in everything haha but the down side is dealing with Elders who have girl problems. One Elder has a girlfriend here, no buono. And another Elder is a big time player, flirts with literally every girl he shakes hands with. We had a sub teacher one day and the teacher called him out on it! Made my job a little bit easier! The church seriously needs to consider having separate MTC's. One for Elders and one for sisters, in Provo at least. So last night we had a devotional and Elder Russell M. Nelson spoke to us! Not only that but mi collega and I had front row seats! We made a sweet deal with a security guard who sits up front every devotional so we'll have front row seats the rest of our stay here :) He had the best, shortest quote ever: "Have character, don't be one." As missionaries we need to have Christ-like attributes, we shouldn't be goofing around being a character because it certainly withdraws the attention away from our Savior to us. It should be the other way around. All the attention should be around Christ, not us. Okay, we have this training resource center (TRC) where we speak Italian to random people who also served in Italy, and they judge our language skills from us teaching them lessons. Talk about intimidating! So Anziano Calchera and I said a prayer before we went into our first lesson which was on the Atonement. I thought it was a very hard lesson to teach but we did fantastic! Words just came to me and I was speaking descently smooth without thinking about what I was going to say, but our second lesson was on families. Sounds like a simple lesson right? Nope, it was a terrible lesson and we got a harsh review of our lesson. We were thinking about what went wrong forever, turns out we forgot to say a prayer before our second lesson. Thinking back on that I definitely noticed a difference in the personal connection we made from the first lesson to the next. It may sound lame but my testimony of prayer has grown on a large scale here at the MTC! Next topic, you guys have to look up this talk by Elder Bednar called Character of Christ. Incredible!! Don't really have time to get into it but it changed my perspective on how to serve a mission big time! I just realized I'm using a lot of exclamation marks, apparently I'm really excited about being a missionary.
Alright can you keep the NBA updates coming til it's over? After that you can cut me off ha and also can you check my credit card account? My payment never showed up on the computer before I left so I never got around to that. I hope you got my letter about some things I'd like, if not here's some: my college backpack, my oil containers from my dressor, some family pictures and I forget anything else I said. I have some pictures, hope you enjoy!
Ciao!
Anziano LaFaye
