Hi everybody!
Today is my first preparation-day since I've been at the Mission Training Center. It's been pretty crazy! I'm busy all day every day and it's really exhausting, but definitely fun and an amazing growing experience.
The MTC (Missionary Training Center) is in Provo, Utah and it's basically a big college where missionaries learn how to teach well. I have a companion, Elder Fischer, who I'm with all the time. I get along really well with him, he's very nice.
I'm part of a "district" which is basically the class that I'm in - there are 12 of us in the district. There are 2000 missionaries here at the MTC right now, and about 75,000 Mormon missionaries all across the world.
My day is pretty tight packed which makes time fly by! The first two days were really hard and pretty slow, but after those time is just zipping by! Here's my schedule:
6:00 a.m. - Wake up and shower/get dressed in dress pants, white shirt, and tie.
7:00 - Breakfast - the MTC food is very good - it ranges from chicken fried steak to sweet and sour chicken and rice to some kind of heavenly taco soup. I don't know. It was really good.
7:45 - Exercise! We get to exercise for an hour every day and I usually play soccer, frisbee, or volleyball.
8:45 - Shower and change version 2.0
9:15 - Class - I have two teachers - one teaches the morning and one teaches in the afternoon or evening. My teachers are really amazing! They leave all of the learning up to the classroom and don't really tell us anything. I really like that and it's helped me learn a lot.
11:30 - Teaching appointment! Elder Fischer and I are teaching two investigators as practice for when we both go out to Florida. We plan lessons for them and pray and think about them a lot. It's really helped me to become a lot less focused on myself and focus more on the people I'm teaching.
12:15 - Lunch
1:00 - Class
4:00 - Dinner. OK, I'll be honest, this dinner time is really weird. I'm used to working from 4-11 and then eating right after that, so it took some getting used to... Our schedule varies day to day, so sometimes we eat around
5:30 and I can actually stay full until bedtime.
5:45 - Teaching appointment
6:15 - Class
9:00 - Personal and companion study - my companion and I follow a routine for how we plan for those we teach. First we get a basic idea of what we want them to know, feel, and do in the lesson, then we split up into individual study, then come together and put our individual ideas together. It's hard sometimes, but really fulfilling.
10:15 - Personal time AKA frantically writing letters.
10:30 - Bedtime. I live in a room with my companion and two other missionaries - Elder Roy and Elder Whittle. They're absolutely amazing and basically some of my best friends now.
So that's mission life in a nutshell! I was also called to be a "zone leader" which basically means that I can tell anybody here what to do.(That's not actually what it means.) So, I have my "district", the 12 people in my class, and there are 5 classes in our "zone". So a total of about 70-ish missionaries overall. It's my responsibility, along with 5 other zone leaders, to make sure everybody is doing really well and stays happy and comfortable. It's a lot of pressure but gives me a lot of people to think about and worry about. In a good way! I really enjoy my calling as a zone leader.
I miss all of you lots! I already look forward to getting to Florida and teaching and loving the people there. It was hard to adjust to the MTC and I'm sure it'll be hard to adjust to Florida, but I really look forward to it.
Until next week,
Elder McMullin
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| Arial view of the Provo UT MTC |
Asher - I loved reading about your day in the MTC! Do missionaries call each other "Elder"?
ReplyDeleteMeta Jezik
Asher said : Missionaries sure do call each other "Elder"! Or "Sister", if you're a girl serving a mission. I haven't actually heard my first name in 2 weeks now! It's just "Elder McMullin". It's really interesting, actually. To me it's a really unifying thing to all be called "Elder" or "Sister" because sometimes I forget that we're all brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ.
DeleteThe taco soup is called "Tortilla soup" or "sopa de tortilla" (traditional Mexican cuisine). I agree teaching helps one be less focused inward. I am interested in what kind of lessons you plan.
ReplyDeleteAsher said:Our lessons are always centered on Jesus Christ and how we can develop a relationship with him. We have, essentially, three main lessons that we teach to investigators and then other things as we feel are applicable to the person we're teaching. That's the main focus of what we're learning here at the MTC - how to teach people, not lessons. Our first lesson is very focused on getting to know the person better and where they're at. It's talking with them about their religious background, how they feel about Jesus Christ, and asking why they're meeting with missionaries. This gives us an idea of what we want to teach so we can really help them. So we teach a lesson, but not really out of a lesson plan. We have specific points that we'll teach our investigators, and usually plan a lesson that we think would be good for them, but I don't think that we've actually followed our lesson plan fully in the 11 lessons my companion and I have taught so far. We tend to stray from the lesson plan when we feel that what we prepared isn't the most applicable to them at this time, or that they really need something else. We also leave
Delete"commitments", which are very important in helping investigators to progress. Some commitments might be "Will you attend church with us this Sunday", or "Will you pray to know that God loves you?", or just any things that we feel would really benefit the person and build their faith. Then we check up on these commitements and talk about them in the next lesson.