"Temple walk on Sunday!"
"Remember how you told me to take time to smell the roses in life on my mission? Mission accomplished ;)"
"I'm really loving this camera, btw."
"Quotes from our ten minute 'District bonding time' that we have every night, haha. Elder Wilson (DL) likes to write them and have us vote on the best one every night."
"The map and some familiar faces :)"
"Practicing our lesson for Juan :)
(Juan is actually Hermano Ball, btw. He's our teacher now, replacing Hermana Doxey)"
"When our district is having difficulty studying, the Hermanas flee to a separate classroom, haha."
"Hermana Doxey's last night!"
"Last one, love you all!"
Como le va, familia?? (I wish there was a Spanish keyboard on this computer...)
I can't tell you how much fun it is to read your emails and your letters. I LOVE this!! I'm so glad to hear that the trek fireside went so well (that letter from the Samuels was awesome. Thanks Dad!) and that baptism sounds super neat.
Some quick items of business... :)
-Mom, I have my Spanish hymnal, I thought the English one would be helpful in these big meetings, but they have big screens with the words projected in almost all of them. So no worries :)
-I got the vacuum bags! Thanks so much. Those will be very helpful.
-Ok, a huge apology to any missionaries that I never wrote to. Haha, letters are the best!! DearElder.com, I've decided, is the greatest invention ever. Our District Leader brings in the mail twice daily, and we get those DearElders the day they're sent to us (I got yours, Mike. Thank you!! I'll send off a letter today).
-Thanks to Aunt Wendy for the letter and the emails from Jace! Those were fantastic! Also, thanks to Jonathan for the letter, and to Sister Webber for the Cocoa Bean Cupcakes!! My district loved them. That was an awesome surprise.
-Mike, thanks for the advice about only writing on preparation days (Saturday, as you've all discovered). It can be tricky trying to focus during class (and especially during unstructured study time - at least 3-4 hours daily), and I know it would be that much harder if I was trying to justify writing letters during that time, haha. I'll get to writing back to everyone I've heard from today!
I'm in a trio now! We miss Hermana Hubbard a lot, but we've been doing great. We all teach well together, and although Hermana Adair and I were nervous about decision-making and teaching being a problem, it totally hasn't been. Life is good for H. Adair, Grover and Woolley!
I don't think I told you yet about my teacher here, Hermana Doxey. She's way cool. In my interview with her, we both realized that we had had very similar experiences with conversion and coming to know that we needed to serve a mission. She's been great with keeping our district comfortable with learning together and united. Unfortunately, she moves to Mexico next week! She's going to teach at the Mexico MTC, and I know she's going to do amazing there, but we'll definitely miss her! She and Hermana Nichigushi (another teacher - she's great too. Way good at making sure we don't get away with faking the answers to her questions, haha) are in a couple of the pictures I'll attach.
We've had some super motivating experiences this week. I struggled with a couple of our lessons with our "investigator," Juan, and I got kinda frustrated because we weren't making any progress! Thankfully, we've been able to learn from those experiences right away, and they haven't kept us in a funk or anything.
Towards the end of our day of class Thursday (I think), Hermano Salsbury (another teacher) stopped in to talk to us about our teaching. He started reminding us all how we need to ask more questions, commit our investigators to things more specific to them, etc. It's been tough hearing things like that, because we're all starting to feel like we pretty much understand how to teach, we just don't have the vocabulary to do it! After telling Hermano Salsbury this, he was definitely inspired, and went into a major pep-talk. He had us look at Matthew 17:20. He told us that this meant that we needed to have the faith in our potential, even as a mustard seed has faith to be a tree. He said that, of course, it would be overwhelming to a small seed if someone told it that it needed to be a huge tree, giving off other seeds. He told us that a redwood tree takes in 500 gallons of water each day, and to imagine if we tried to give a seed that much water. Then, he told us to imagine taking all of the light that a redwood tree takes in during a day, and focusing it onto a seed as well. It'd be destroyed! Basically, we learned that we needed to stop trying to drink 500 gallons of water a day, haha. Because, "The Lord expects progression, not perfection." If we know more Spanish on one day than we knew the day before, the Lord is pleased. :) We all really needed that.
Also, I've been told that you can't find this talk online, but Elder Bednar's talk "The Character of Christ," is incredible. They show a recording of the time he gave it at the MTC here every Sunday night. I miiiight just go watch it every week I'm here, haha.
Oh! I ran into some Elders heading to Thailand yesterday! They stopped our trio and asked if they could share a message. It was so awesome!! The Elder sharing his testimony sounded so good. I may not know ANYTHING about that language, but I know that he was making the same sounds that Mike does when he shares his testimony in Thai (haha), and I told him that it sounded exactly like what I was hearing while we were over there. That was a fun tender mercy.
Another funny story real quick: I had accidently left some of my workout clothes in the shower the other day, and I randomly found my nice workout pants in the giveaway box! I was really glad to have gotten them back. However, a couple of days ago, I was walking through our residence hall, and the girl in front of me had on a familiar Youth Conference shirt. I was racking my brain to figure out if I knew her, if she was from Florida, and as soon as I got into my room, I realized that it was my shirt, haha. Oops. Good thing it was a tshirt I got for free! I'm definitely going to be more careful about that from now on.
I'm about out of time, and it sounds like everyone's having trouble uploading pics, so I'm going to try to get on that a little early.
I love you all so much! If you can send DearElders telling me how you're doing, that'd be awesome, because I have unlimited time to read those, and limited time on the computer :)
Love you, love you, love you!
The Church is so true :)
Love,
Hermana Grover
PS - remember how you told me to take time to smell the roses in life on my mission? Mission accomplished ;)
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