It's a Great Day to be a Missionary!

August 09, 2018

It's a Great Day to be a Missionary!

Hello Hello Hello!!!

"It's a great day to be a missionary!" I say that every morning and every day it is so true!! Time is flying here at the MTC and I am loving it here! I learn so much every single day and I am getting more confident in teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ! The Lord is SO involved in all of our lives and there are tender mercies everywhere if we look for them!

We got our flight plans this week!! We are leaving the MTC Monday morning (August 13) at 6:15 in the morning! We fly to Atlanta Georgia and then to Richmond Virginia! There are 14 people in my travel group! I can't wait to get to Virginia and get to work!:)

They keep us super busy here at the MTC and it's awesome! We have class twice a day for 3 hours. During class we do a lot of role-play teaching and learning about ways to teach the Gospel simply and powerfully. Our teacher Sister Reynolds is getting married tomorrow in Seattle so Monday was her last day teaching us. Thankfully we got another awesome teacher Sister Rogers who will be teaching us the rest of the time. We get opportunities to practice teaching every single day! Sister Ray and I also got the opportunity to teach Relief Society on Sunday! We taught about the Apostasy, Restoration and Heavenly Messengers. I learned a lot while preparing this lesson and loved being able to teach the other sisters in our zone. Another fun thing we got to do this week was host the new missionaries! Yesterday we spent about 3 hours going to the parking garage, getting missionaries out of their car, watching them say goodbye to their families, taking them to get their name tag, carrying luggage up stairs, and sending them off to their classrooms! It was so much fun but man it was a workout haha! Carrying luggage up stairs is a lot harder than it looks! I got to host 4 new missionaries. One of them was from Japan and barely spoke any English haha! We would try to talk to each other but we just ended up laughing most of the time. She was adorable!

This week we have had some AMAZING devotionals!! On Sunday evening we got to hear from the talented Jenny Oaks Baker! She's so cool. She talked about Christ and the peace and happiness we feel when we follow him. She shared an incredible story about a trial that her family has had. Her main message was that the things that are hard in life LEAD us to something much bigger! God has a perfect plan for his imperfect children and as we TRUST HIM He will always lead us to peace and safety! As she spoke she would stop and play songs with her four children. They are all extremely talented and the spirit in that room was SO STRONG! Our Tuesday night devotional was with Jean B. Bingham (the Relief Society General President)! She's so amazing! She talked a lot about patterns in the gospel. Some of her examples were: "Search, ponder and pray", "Ask, seek, knock" and "Look to God and Live". These patterns are something that all of us should be living in our lives! As we make these patterns the most important patterns in our life we will be lead by the spirit to the things we need to do. She also spoke about the importance of missionary work. Each person here in the MTC is called to a different place for a different reason. There are people waiting for me individually because of my unique talents, abilities and experiences. On Sunday night I also got to watch the talk "Missions are Forever" by Elder Holland and WOW that was motivating!! Elder Holland always brings so much power to his talks. He spoke about how important our calling is and that we only get one chance so we better give it all we got! I'm so excited to get into the field and work as hard as I can!!!!:) It won't be easy but I know it will be worth it!

Every single day I have small tender mercies or experiences that build my testimony of how real this gospel is! It's truly incredible!! God is SO involved in our lives and I have seen His hand so many times in the last 2 weeks!! I hope you all have a great week! Next time I talk to you i'll be in Virginia!! LOVE YOU❤
~Sister Stringham :)