Survived another week at the MTC!

Hi family!

4 days until we fly out to Oklahoma! I feel surprisingly prepared. It probably has to do with the fact that we've spent every waking moment for the last week and a half role playing as if we are already in the field. I am far over my fear of public speaking at this point.

Our time at the MTC has had a few challenges, but overall it has been a great experience. Earlier this week, Sister Lofgran was seriously considering going home. We spend a good portion of Monday sitting in the main MTC office waiting on each step of the process of sending missionaries home. In the end though, she was able to speak to her mom and brother who gave her some great advice and also received a priesthood blessing and felt a lot better. We are so glad she decided to stay!

While we were waiting in the office though, we were able to meet the newest district president of the MTC and he told us a really cool story. He said that one of the converts in his old ward shared her conversion story with him. She said that when she opened the door and saw the sister missionaries on her doorstep, she looked inside at her three teenage daughters and back at the missionaries and thought, "that's what I want my daughters to be like." The district president bore testimony to us that sister missionaries have a special spirit about them and that they have effects on people that elders don't always have! 

This week, we've been working with a few different "investigators". I put that in quotes because almost all of them are just volunteers acting as investigators. We never know for sure though. We had been struggling all week to bring the Spirit to our lessons. We had the information down but the feedback we got from our teacher was that our lessons were better suited for some kind of big presentation to a group about the church, and weren't very good for connecting with the individual. Our biggest challenge was with Rob, an investigator role played by our teacher that we've been working with all week. It seemed like no matter what we taught, we couldn't help him see how the gospel would bless his life personally. He was getting all the information, but didn't have any desire to know for himself whether it was true. So on Thursday, we just buckled down and really prayed to know what questions we could ask Rob to connect with him better. When we finally met with him later that day, it was AMAZING. I'm still not even sure exactly what we did differently that time, but I know we were guided by the Spirit. Sister Lofgran and I both knew exactly what to say to him, and by the end, Rob committed to be baptized. When our teacher brought us back in, out of character, to give us feedback, he told us that we had finally figured out how to be instruments in the Lord's hands. The Spirit was so strong in the room that Sister Lofgran and I both couldn't stop crying. I kept apologizing and saying "this is the problem with working with sister missionaries!" haha. I'm sure the Elders don't cry nearly as much as we do. That breakthrough with Rob was just the extra push we needed to make it through these last couple days.

We watched this little bit of a talk from Elder Bednar yesterday. He said that as long as we're striving to be righteous and follow the commandments, we don't need to worry about whether a prompting is really from the Spirit or if it's just our own minds. Then he said that if we follow all the promptings we have without wasting time questioning them, that is the key to happiness in mortality. I loved that message because it really reaffirmed to me that I'm where I'm supposed to be right now.

Oh, and I saw Sister Struempler here! She got here on Wednesday and is staying in the room right around the corner from us. I was so excited to see her. I also ran into Elder Hunter Hughes. He recognized me and stopped me in the cafeteria.

Anyways, I am loving it at the MTC but I'm so excited to get to OK. Not excited to fly out at six in the morning though. I'll call as soon as I can!