Elder Colton

Elder Colton

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Attitude is Everything

Hola mi familia y mis amigos
 
Even though I always start my messages out with "Hola mi familia y mis amigos" and then proceed to write then entire message in english, I promise that I actually am learning spanish.  It would just be a complete waste of time for me to write in spanish because my already short messages would slim down to only a few sentence.  But...I am learning spanish and have learned more spanish in the last month than I have in four years (although I will also give all my spanish teachers a lot the credit for that because what they taught me has allowed me to learn as much as I have). 
 
This was another great week in the MTC.  One of the things that I've noticed more and more though: attitude is everything on a mission.  If you want to be here and do everything you can to focus on the people you'll be teaching, then you'll love it.  If you focus on the days or letters from home, then it will crawl by and be significantly less fun. 
 
So I think I've explained a little about how the teaching here works at the MTC.  We spend time each day teaching one of our teachers as he or she acts like one of the people they taught on their mission.  We have two full time teachers and one part time teacher.  Our full time teachers are Hermano Sagers and Hermano Wassom, who are two of the greatest teachers in the MTC.  Hermano Sagers takes the role of Jared, a 50ish year old man he taught in Honduras.  It took him a few lessons with Hermano Sagers to even begin to believe in God, so Hermano Sagers acted the exact same way as we've been teaching him.  It's been a challenge to teach him, but his reasoning for not believing in God was because he thought it wasn't fair that he had a lot of good things in his life but everyone else suffered.  It's a little more challenging to teach in spanish but it's actually refreshing because it forces us to be simple.  Our other teacher, Hermano Wassom, acts as Francisco, a nineteen year old he taught when he served his mission in Chile.  A few weeks into teaching him, his mom (who was a member of the Church) had a serious back surgery and watching her attitude towards it helped him realize that her faith wasn't some figment of her imagination and that she actually knew it to be true, which helped him choose to be baptized.  We also just began teaching our part time teacher who is acting as Fernando, a twentyish year old from Puerto Rico.  It's been amazing to teach them and learn from them.  Soon I'll be making the distant drive to Salt Lake to begin my true mission. 
 
-Elder Colton

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