MTC Overtime: Week 9 - Called to Serve...Again, Again, and Again

 Hola! ¿Cómo le va? I hope you had a fantastic week and were able to see the hand of God in your life. My weeks are getting very long and boring. I'm doing my best to stay motivated, but it's really hard to sometimes. I have a strong hope that I'll get out in the field in about a month, maybe a week or two after conference. The older group of compos are most likely going to leave sometime within the next 20 days, so we should be right on track to leave a little while after them.

We actually attended a live devotional this week! It was through technology, but it was awesome to see a member of the Quorum of the Twelve speak to us live. Elder Anderson and his wife spoke to us about the teachings and atonement of Jesus Christ. We were given a sheet of paper with many of the parables and teachings of Christ from the New Testament, as well as the testimonies of the atonement from the Book of Mormon. He exhorted us to memorize them so we can use them at a moment's notice when we're in the field. I'm going to do it because I want to be able to recite them in Spanish to people if I don't have time to look them up. This devotional was a confirmation to me that my decision to study the New Testament right now was right, because I feel that I will need to know these scriptures and that people I teach will be blessed because of them. But, as the title suggests, the opening hymn was "Called to Serve." That's the opening hymn they play at EVERY MTC devotional, and the only one I've seen used in every recording we've watched. I've sung it more times in the past 9 weeks than I have in my entire life! We pretty much all have it memorized in Spanish now anyway so some of us just sing in Spanish, which creates a weird mix of English and Spanish singing. The song is actually better in Spanish because there are 4 verses instead of 2, and the chorus doesn't repeat itself like the English one. Nothing's wrong with it, but I kind of look down on the English version a little bit because I like the Spanish version more. I also had very nice studying and pondering session this week about the Urim and Thummim, Joseph Smith, The Brother of Jared's vision of Christ and everything else, and the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon. A more careful reading of Ether 3 and 4 is definitely worth it and I recommend it to you!

The dry cleaners came this week so I was finally able to get all the lint off my suit! It was clean for maybe 15 minutes before it was covered in lint again. At least I was able to get some black spots off the suit pants that I have no idea how they got there. I gave them my suit on Thursday and they returned it on Saturday. It was 15 soles to wash the whole suit, so only about 4 US dollars. There's a service that buys snacks and other cheap supplies for missionaries in the MTC. They aren't affiliated so families buy the stuff on their website, and then the delivery guy buys the stuff here and delivers it to us while we are at the temple. It's a good business since it gets paid for in American money. I got some American candy from my family. Some guys got boxes of Dunkin' Donuts, a Cinnabon, chips and salsa, and Sorensen got a jar of peanut butter that's practically liquid, so he just takes a sip of it every night.

We've come up with a schedule in my district to come up with games to play. We played Book of Mormon Jeopardy, LDS Family Feud, and a competition game so far. One of the games in the competition, hosted by the hermanas, was to determine if a certain quote was said by a general authority or a Disney princess. It sounds easy, but they are pretty much indistinguishable from each other. All teams were getting them wrong until Elder Haymond and I figured it out and got them right. Some of the quotes weren't even given by princesses though. Some were from Winnie the Pooh. I guess Winnie's a Disney princess now. I'm designing a game based on the Newly Wed Game to see just how well everyone in my district knows their companions.

Elder Tobler's birthday was this week so we had another big dance party for him. One day we took off the air vent covering and have started turning the air really cold so we can have a refrigerator. We smuggle chocolate milks, "Chokys," from the cafeteria to the refrigerator so we can have them later. We'll usually have about 8 in there at a time in addition to the sodas we also store up there. I sort of feel like a moonshiner with our secret compartment to hide our illegal chocolate milk.

One of the latino elders, Elder Bueno, annoys pretty much everybody. I happened to be being taught by him too. He runs around in his garments into every room every night so everyone's started locking their doors and even the doors in the hallway. He would shout down through the hole in the bathroom closet to the hermanas that he was Elder Jensen. I actually fenced him and stabbed him in the chest with a broom handle because he was challenging me to a fight (Not very hard, he was fine and thought it was cool). He started wrestling Elder Tuck, one of the 6 weekers who's absolutely huge and jacked. Tuck threw him to the ground, but cushioned his fall. We're all pretty happy he left to go to his mission today.

One insight that I had this week came with the help of Elder Soward. He brought up that before Eve partook of the forbidden fruit, she likely said something like, "is there no other way?" She was speaking to Satan at the time, but seeing how it was all part of the plan she may as well have been speaking to Heavenly Father. Where else have we heard that phrase before? Jesus Christ felt that way before going through with the Atonement. Nephi asked the same question before killing Laban. It is likely Joseph Smith said something along those lines before enacting polygamy in the early church. All 4 of these situations were very difficult for these people to do, some even breaking commandments. All of them were at pivotal moments in the history of the earth, the gospel, and the restoration. Without these heroes doing these very hard things, Heavenly Father's plan wouldn't have worked. The earth wouldn't be populated, we wouldn't be forgiven of our sins, the Nephites would have dwindled and perished in unbelief, and the church probably would have died in its infancy. All of them would have preferred to do something else to accomplish God's will. "Is there no other way?" But God knows our struggles and sometimes commands hard things of us so that we may learn and grow. We may not immediately understand why God commands us to do certain things, I'm sure some of these characters didn't know why, but God has it all planned out. We may not see His grand vision and be asked to do things that go against our morals, what we believe to be right, or what we want to do, but the blessings for following the Lord's commandments far outweigh any earthly pain or embarrassment we might feel here in mortality.

There you have it! I'll do my best to study as much Spanish as I can this week without getting burned out. I hope you stay safe and have an excellent week!

Elder Jensen

1. Our hiding place

2. Our hoarde

3. Sorensen's peanut butter delight

4. The trio

5. Protecting the back of my neck from the sun

6. Two little yellow birds