Dear Family,
Well, here comes and goes yet another week. I cannot believe how fast everything is going by. There's a saying going on around here that says, "Days feel like weeks and weeks feel like days." Sounds stupid, but we have seen that this is true. You get to the end of the day and feel like it sped by, and then you think back to the first thing that you did that day, and you can't believe that it was in the same day because you had done so much.
Already, I can see that the RC (referral center) is one of my favorite places. There I can talk to real people who are trying to find the gospel and answer their questions. This is not to put down my teachers when I have to teach them. They often pretend to be investigators and we have to teach them. It's all good and fun. At the RC, I've found that doing the chats are extremely fun. When people go to mormon.org, they can click the button that says, "click here to speak to a representative." When they click that button, it sends them straight to a missionary who is logged onto the RC client and there they can chat with the person. I have found many people that are trying to find out what we believe, trying to find out answers to questions that they are having, or even some people that turn to us for counsel! Yes, I, of all people, had to try and give advice to people about things as important as what they should do about getting a job when they get laid off. Yeah, that's been interesting. The way that we go about that is trying to turn it toward the gospel and how that can bless their lives and through those blessings, all things will be all right.
Another thing that I have come to love here at the MTC is the thought of me not having to be somewhere else. Unless it's class after lunch. One of our teachers is a real stickler for being on time and has instituted the "Snickers rule." The Snickers rule says that if you are late, you owe the teacher a Snickers bar. However, it's true for the flipside, too. If our teacher is late, he owes each one of us a Snickers bar. One day we ran into class and we only had four or five seconds to spare before we were late but our teacher wasn't there! About twenty or thirty seconds later, our teacher came running in. He said that he was on time because his watch still said it was 12:14. Pah... oh well. Almost had him.
Oh, wow! Snickers tangent. I like having the thought of not needing to be somewhere else. I know that I can relax and just study everything in depth as much as I'd like. I've found things about the scriptures that I had never known before. I've continued to read "Jesus the Christ" and have found very awesome things about the Jesus Christ that I have never even thought about before. Like: who were the pharisees and the scribes? Where did they come from? There's no talk about there needing to be scribes and pharisees in the Bible. It gives a wonderful background on where these class groups within the Jewish culture at that time came from.
One of our teachers, Brother Bott (yes he teaches at BYU), gave us some very helpful advice about memorizing scriptures. He said that whenever you study the scriptures, remember where they are because chances are, that day you will have someone ask you a question that you can answer specifically with those scriptures. He's accumulated so many scriptures, it's hard to comprehend. He'll give a lecture, and in the middle like coming from his own words, he'll blurt out a scripture and then tell you exactly where it is in the scriptures. Sometimes he'll even use quotes from books that the modern-day prophets wrote. He has such a vast knowledge of the scriptures and modern writings of the prophets that it's hard to keep up with him, even when he's telling you where they are. He is definitely a person that I want to be like, so I've been taking his advice seriously, and I've already had the scriptures I've studied put to use.
The other day we had pizza day in the cafeteria, and I wish that they'd never do it again and spare all the poor new missionaries from this horrible experience. The pizza was actually pretty good, but the lines were monstrous. I came to dinner at the usual time and it took me nearly thirty minutes to get through line. This left me with ten minutes to eat and get to class. As you could imagine, we were late for class, and now we owe our teacher Snickers bars. The lines in the cafeteria aren't really ever that bad except for on pizza day because they have each missionary pull off their own pieces of pizza from the box, which doesn't have them completely cut. So each missionary has to rip the two or three pieces that they want from the box. Not a fun experience.
The spirit here at the MTC is nothing short of amazing. You can feel it everywhere and can feel it in everything that you do. The language is coming along very quickly and we can already introduce ourselves, introduce our family, bare a very simple testimony, pray, and contact people. Also, in my scripture study, I'm seeing things that I don't think that I would have ever seen. It takes me about five to eight minutes to read a page of scripture, but that's because I'm reading into each verse and marking them as much/neatly as possible. I have probably marked my scriptures twenty or thirty times as much this last week than I have in my life. It's truly mind boggling. I'm also a little bit glad that I haven't marked my scriptures up before, because I have a marking system that goes completely against the "mark everything red!" method. I bought one of those mechanical scripture marking pencils that has eight different colors. It was expensive, but I'm making it worth it.
I thank all of you who have been writing me and I ask that you continue. I've found that when I get letters from home, I know what's going on and that gives me peace of mind so that I don't have to worry about what is happening. That way I can concentrate during the day instead of daydreaming about what could be happening at home. However, please don't send your emails to my email that is posted on this blog (monka90@myldsmail.net) because I can only access it for thirty minutes once a week. That's barely enough time for me to write this monster of a letter! So, if you'd mind, please send me DearElders. They're completely free and they deliver it to my mailbox the same day. The URL for it is: www.dearelder.com. I love to hear from all of you, and I will write you back if you write me. It's a promise.
I love you all very much and pray for your well-being,
Starsi Monk