A Bit About Our Teaching Format

Hello Everybody!

      

   This week was great! Campus has been very busy lately so that's very good. It's funny to see all of the little things that remind me of going to Lawrence last year - acapella groups practicing in little campus corners, four square tournaments on the plaza, guitar sing alongs on the plaza, etc. We are meeting with a girl who just read the entire Book of Mormon in about a week. She's really great and has a lot of amazing insights that help me learn! I'm learning more out here than the people that we're supposed to be teaching.

       

   So our lessons usually go as follows - I thought that I should give a little briefer on what the discussions that missionaries teach are like. I love teaching lessons, it's really fun and an amazing, spiritual experience. The hard part is finding people to teach, and that's what we do a lot here.

     When we teach, we open by praying to invite the Spirit - a lot of the time either I or Elder Day, my companion, will say the opening prayer and then ask the person we are meeting with to say the closing prayer. Then we follow up on their commitments - we always invite people to do something during a lesson, whether it be to pray on their own, come to church, read from the Book of Mormon, and many other commitments. These things help people to come closer to Christ and so it's really important for us to follow up on them to make sure that they are doing these things, or to check in to see if we can do anything to help them keep their commitments. 

    Then we teach them something that we feel will benefit them the most - we always focus on what they really need and do that by thinking a lot about what they are going through or what could bless their lives the most. We invite them to do something, related to what we taught or what they most need, then close with prayer.

     Most of the lessons that we teach are just 1 on 1 on campus - this means that Elder Day and I split up and walk around a little plaza finding people to teach. We are able to talk to more people and teach more lessons this way since there are so many people to talk to. We also have lessons in our church building, which is really nice because it's away from the distractions of campus and in a place where, hopefully, they will be able to come to for church on Sundays.

           Here are some pictures from this week...

Here we are at a huge antique car collection that we were able to visit today. It was really amazing! I've never really been into mechanics or cars or anything but it was really neat to hear about all of the history behind the cars. The man who runs the place has stories for almost all of the 200+ cars here. We went with all of the missionaries from Gainesville and Ocala, where the collection was.

Here is me looking awkward while playing viola in Zone Conference last thursday. Our zone is about 40 missionaries, coming from Gainesville, Ocala, and Chiefland.

Here is everybody in the performance - Sister Koener and Elder Faust sang along. We performed a hymn called "Be Still my Soul", which is one of my favorites. Sister Koener came into the mission at the same time that I did but Elder Faust is going home in three weeks.  They sing very well and it was amazing to be able to perform here!

So there it is! Everything is good here in Florida, and I hope that it's good everywhere else!

       Until next week,

             Elder McMullin