First week in CA

It's been like, high 60s low 70s the whole time I've been here so ha. 😉 Prmary programs are the best. The apartment is nice. They have me in a tri-companionship being trained by two zone leaders, so it's a little small, particularly at dinner time when we're all trying to use the kitchen. It's good though, there's even a bunch of exercise equipment that Elder Mills picked up from people in the ward who were getting rid of them. My companions are Elder Mills and Elder Baker. I'll send a picture, but Elder Mills is the big guy with bright red hair and Elder Baker is the shorter one with the light brown hair. I'm the one in the middle, just in case you've forgotten what I look like. 😉 Elder Mills has been in this ward for the past four or five transfers, so he knows the area really well. He's pretty crazy, but when he teaches it's really powerful, he's cool. Then there's Elder Baker, he irritates Elder Mills a bit, but I think he's really funny. Plus he was in the Spanish mission for his first thirteen months, so he's fluent in Spanish. It's really nice to have him, we can talk to everybody we see. They're both great, it's going to be a good two transfers. The ward is super nice, and they feed us quite a bit, it was like three days into my mission before I had to actually make my own meal. 

Last week at MTC

Sunday we heard from a guy named Chad Lewis, he played football at BYU and then in the NFL. It was really cool, he talked about his mission and the importance of working hard. 

Monday we picked up a new investigator named Anna. She's from Russia and she's learning English at BYU, so she has a really cool accent. She said she learned English with some missionaries back in Russia and she wanted to learn more. After we finished talking to Anna we had about ten minutes to eat lunch before we had to go teach a lesson to Linda, which went well. 

Tuesday we taught Anna. She asked a lot of questions that really made us have to think. We ended up writing quite a few of her questions down so we could look into them and answer them later. Then in the evening we had a devotional where we heard from President Kearon of the seventy. He talked about dealing with rough days on the mission. We all go through hard times whether we like it or not, so we might as well make the decision to be positive and happy anyways. 

I didn't sleep well Tuesday night, so I was really tired all day Wednesday and I don't remember very much of what happened. Sooo yeah.

Thursday we went to an infield orientation about how to work with members. It basically was a two hour presentation telling us to follow the rules and work hard so members trust us enough to help out and refer their friends. It probably would've been more useful, but the person they paired me up with to do roll plays with really didn't want to be there, so he was pretty impossible to work with. It's alright though, I felt like I learned a little from it. After the infield orientation the sisters showed us a song they wrote about our district. It was to the tune of Rudolph the Red-nosed reindeer, and it was pretty funny. For our afternoon class Brother Oniki helped us work on tailoring the lessons to be more applicable to our investigators needs. Then at night we were back in our room when we heard a knock at the door. We opened it up and one of the other districts in our building started piling in our room and singing Jingle Bells. They went all out, some had bells and others had Santa hats, it was really funny. I think that's the most I've experienced the spirit of Christmas in the middle of September before. 

In our class with Brother Oniki on Friday he taught us how to extend a baptism invitation in the first lesson with someone without it being weird or awkward, it was good. Then we had our last lesson with Anna. We usually teach lessons outside, but it was raining super hard, so after we found her we had to wander around the nearby building a bit until we found an empty classroom we could teach her in. We taught her about the plan of salvation and bore our testimonies, then we said our farewells and encouraged her to keep reading and praying and trying to learn for herself that the Book of Mormon is true. As we were walking away she told us that we'd helped her more than any other missionaries she'd met so far. That was a huge testimony builder for me because I had thought that our lessons with Anna hadn't been going very well at all even though I'd been trying to do my best to teach by the spirit, but once she said that I realized that the things we say under the influence of the spirit make a bigger impact on people than we may think that they do at the time. It's important to remember that I'm not the real teacher out here, the spirit is. 

Today we did laundry and Elder Hart got mad at the MTC barber. We missed our appointment because our morning trip to the temple took longer than we thought it would, and Elder Hart was super offended that the barber had a totally booked schedule and wouldn't let him in. The barber was being perfectly reasonable and even found him an appointment for Monday, I'm not sure why it made Elder Hart so mad. Now we're sitting outside and writing emails to people so Elder Hart and Elder Schell can try to listen to the announcer for the BYU football game. 

I'm going to miss my district, but I'm definitely excited to leave and start my mission for real. I love you all, I'll be keeping you in my prayers!!

-Elder Clark

MTC week 2

It turned out I actually needed the tetanus shot too, so I got both of those. That's a bummer about the fall league, but I figured with the high schools doing a season in the fall there'd be less of them doing it, so I'm not surprised. I know you already got me a fair amount of socks, but is there any chance you could send me some lighter ones? The thick ones I have combined with my not too breathable shoes are cooking my feet.

On Monday we did some service in the morning. It wasn't very hard, we just took out trash and vacuumed and stuff, but it was a nice way to start out the day. On the way to our morning class some of the Elders convinced the sisters that it was our district leader's birthday. It was actually the last Monday, but we all wished him happy birthday and played along, and it was kind of funny. Then the sisters got him a present, and that made us all feel pretty bad. So at dinner everyone was trying to decide who should tell them it wasn't actually his birthday and how to do it until I just turned to the sisters and told them. Fortunately they weren't mad, they just thought it was funny too. That was also the day we found our investigators, so we did spiritual things too. 

Also an Elder that was leaving was getting rid of some ties, so I got five or six free ties. All but two of them looked pretty ugly, but hey, free ties.

On Tuesday we got to hear a talk from Elder Oaks. Our district sat like, three rows from the front, so that was pretty sweet. He took a lot of stuff straight out of the preach my gospel book, which kind of testified to me that we already have all the stuff we need right at our fingertips and all we have to do is use it.

On Wednesday we learned how to use the online teaching center, which is where the chat box on mormon.org gets sent to. People talk to real investigators and get real baptisms in there, so it's a pretty sweet experience. Well, sometimes it is anyway. The only chat Elder Hart and I got on Wednesday was someone with the screen name Sam Sung asking us if we knew a scientific equation that proves that God exists. We bore our testimony to him and told him if he really wants to know if God exists he should ask God himself. It pretty clearly was just someone trying to troll us, but it was kind of funny. In our afternoon class our teacher taught us about the power the Book of Mormon has to convert people. He told us about an investigator from his mission named Debbie. Debbie had been praying to find the true church for a while when they met her, so she was totally ready to do the things they told her she should do. She read the whole Book of Mormon in two weeks, and he said most of the time she pretty well taught the lesson for them. It was really cool to hear about her. We also put together a goodie bag and apologized to the sisters for tricking them into thinking it was Elder Nielsen's birthday, and we gave it to them in class Wednesday.

Thursday I extended my first baptism invitation. It was terrifying, even though the spirit was totally prompting me to say it, I was so nervous that it took two or three tries to get the words out. But, she said if she gets an answer when shole e prayed that night she'd do it, so the spirit knows what it's doing. Elder Hart was saying the whole walk to class that I was crazy for saying that so soon and I need to slow down, but then when we got to class and told everyone about it Brother Bennett, one of our teachers, asked who else had invited one of their investigators to be baptized. Nobody else raised their hand, and he chastised us pretty severely. He said we should be bringing it up in the first or second meeting and not wait until later and spring it on them all of the sudden in a later lesson.

On Friday we met with both our investigators. The investigator I invited to get baptized said she'd do it, and we committed the other one to reading the Book of Mormon. Both lessons went really well, it was great. 

Today we went to the temple. We were going to do endowments, but this woman came up to us with a bunch of family names and asked if we could do initiatives for them, so we did that today. Now I'm in the laundry room listening to someone play the ukulele and poorly sing a song from Moana.

Elder Hart is hard to talk to when he's convinced he's right. He's not very good at listening, he just wants to talk and talk and talk until everyone agrees with him. It's a little tiresome, but it's okay. He cares a lot about helping everybody feel happy and welcome and I love him to death. 

Anyways, I think that's pretty well it, I love you guys! 

Calvin Clark MTC

Hi mom, the first few days have been really good. It's been hard work, but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. It's been super spiritual and quite a bit of fun too. On the first day we had a really cool devotional, the three members of the MTC presidency and their wives spoke to us and welcomed us to the MTC. Then we sang Bring the World His Truth I think? I have trouble remembering what it's  called, but anyways they changed the words from "we will be the Lord's missionaries" to "we are now the Lord's missionaries." It was a really cool moment to just realize that I'm here and I'm a missionary now. The spirit was super strong. After that we met our zone leaders. They seemed pretty craz better y, but they've been here a while and they're only here until Monday, so I'm pretty sure they're really itching to get out into the field. My companion's name is Elder Hart. We get along really well. He's really social and talkative, which is pretty nice most of the time. He kind of didn't give me much room to talk in our first meeting with our investigator, but we talked about it and our next lesson was better. It's hard to know the right things to say, but I have faith that it'll get better with practice. I really like my district, they're all really cool people. They do make me miss my frisbee friends a bit, but I like them all, I really can't complain. I feel like I'm getting a lot better at loving people like Christ did. There was one devotional where we listened to recordings from some investigators talking about themselves so we could practice making inferences about people from things that they tell us. Even though they were just recordings I felt an overwhelming love for them and just wanted to help however I could. It was really neat. Today in the morning we got to go to the temple and it was beautiful.  I think that's pretty well it. I'm having trouble figuring out a good way to make the group email work, this email app is weird, but I wanted to at least get one to you.

I love you guys! 

-Elder Clark

 

Oh, and I also wanted to tell dad that I found out that Elder Hart's dad also served in Japan. So that's cool.