Febuary 6th 2013

Wow, congrats Ashley and Matt!! :)
And it sounds like you all are having fun and doing well! Poor Mahonri though, I miss him.

This week has been a little hard for me.  Everything's just hard. There's a lot of pressure. And it just gets overwhelming sometimes. But it's all worth it in the end when you get to see a miracle or two. My favorite is teaching lessons. That's when I really get to see all our work come together, the Spirit's always there and I get to remember what it's all about. I remember why I'm exhausting myself of everything I have every minute of every day of every week. I do it because I love it. I love the people. I love the Gospel and I love sharing the Gospel with people.  This week we had a lot of success with Oleg, our investigator with a family. Sister Lund and I set up a mock MTC sacrament with our whole district. Everyone had a role to play and we had Sister Crayne from the advanced district give a talk and Elder Fernandez (the one from Tri-Cities) conduct the meeting. We forgot to tell him who was playing Oleg's 2 year old daughter though and he called her as activities director. That was an awkwardly hilarious moment... haha but it was great fun. The next lesson we had with Oleg we gave in room we have sacrament as if we were teaching him at church. My teacher said that he had never experienced such a peaceful lesson before as an investigator. Again, this lesson came at the most perfect time because I had really felt down that day... or the day before. But I've been thinking a lot about a quote from Joseph Smith or at least in the Joseph Smith movie that was along the lines of "the Lord has to bring you low so that he can take you higher." My experience here at the MTC has shown me more that anything else how stinking prideful, selfish, and faith-lacking that I am. That may sound weird and it's been hard, like I said. But I agreed to represent Jesus Christ. I put that name tag on every morning and it's His work. The more I get in the way with my own pride, the less work can be done. He's just trying to dig it all out.

So our district is becoming more like Frankenstein's monster each week. We have a new addition--Elder -----. He's one of the Olders that broke his foot so he couldn't go out to the field yet like everyone else. Poor guy, between that and his family not writing him, he's not doing so well. But he's still happy and fun to be around. Hopefully he can help us with our Russian too. :)
Also, we got our new tags this week!!!!! Like the ones we'll be using in the field with our names in Russian! There's so cool!
Love you!

сестра джонсон

Here's my guess at Ben and Emily's names in Russian.

беиджамин (Benjamin)

имели(Emily)

P.S. Sorry it was short today.