Another Great Week (Week 7)

This is a couple days late because I was at Girls Camp all of last week!! Here's the email!

"Hello everyone!!!

Another great week!

It has become known among all that I love to eat ranch with a lot of my food. Therefore,  they like to have me do something weird with ranch. Yesterday it was ice cream and ranch. I really do not recommend it, but I guess it could have been worse. The ranch here is the same as the ranch at BYU. Pretty yummy, I think they make it homemade or something. Other than that, the food is still pretty sub-par and I don't know how I have survived off of it for this long. Sometimes we just eat a PB&J or cereal for every meal. Seems healthy. Also, people keep sending DearElder cookies and brownies and so we are eating a bunch of that at night when we get back to our rooms and are ravenous (because we eat dinner at like 4).

The coolest thing happened on Sunday! We had choir practice, which was incredible because there are about 1500 people in the choir now which is an absolutely amazing and spiritual experience. THEN at devotional..guess who casually shows up? ELDER BEDNAR YEAH THAT'S RIGHT for the second time in the time that I have been here, he has come to speak to us! So cool. He did a question and answer session and I wanted to ask a question (because when will I ever have that experience again?!) but I sadly did not get called on. Still a totally mind-blowing devotional though AH. Tuesday devotional was actually super good too. We had Elder CLarke from the Emeritus Seventy. My favorite quote from him was "If you learn to love your problems, you will love life" and "we can't afford to let other people determine our happiness"

This week we finished our Russian grammar book that we have been learning out of. That's how we now our time at the MTC is coming to a close. I think it's 11 days left now? That's absolutely insane! We get flight plans tomorrow and I think that I get to email when I get them so that everyone knows what the plans are with that. Anyways, now when we work on Russian, we just review the grammar that we have already learned and try to actually apply all of it into our conversations. We have bee struggling with our goal to learn 50 words, 15 phrases and 1 scripture each day, but we are slowly getting better at it. It might not sound like that much, but it's a lot when you don't have that much free time to study, trust me! Also, when it is so easy to get distracted by all of the new people in our zone. Learning this language is such a whirlwind all of the time. I can't believe that so much has happened in such a short amount of time. We don't use notes anymore and we can understand when our teachers tell us random stories and we can actually laugh at Russian jokes now! HOW cool is that? I am so blessed to be here and to have such awesome teachers and companions. I couldn't be more thankful. I know that this is exactly where I need to be in my life right now.

One of my favorite chapters of study this week was D&C 138. It's one of the coolest things I have ever read. I've also been studying charity a lot and I love the end of chapter 7 in Moroni. I am about 20 pages from finishing the Book of Mormon. I started when I got here and wow it's been great to re-read.

Also... I didn't realize that Tasmania was a real place? I met an Elder from Australia and he was telling me all about how Tasmania is real and now I want to go there. I have gotten to know the sister who is also going to Seattle and she seems super nice, I am super super excited for her to be here, I know she'll be awesome! I remember being in her shoes and struggling with how to say "hello" and "goodbye" in Russian, but she has already come so far. Being an STL, I feel like it's my duty to get to know everyone and be extra nice to everyone.

We skyped Katarina from the Yekaterinberg  mission in Russia on Monday. She was so nice and we were teaching her about the spirit and it was the perfect lesson for her! She was telling us about how it is one of her absolute favorite gospel principles. Her faith is so strong and we could understand about 90% of what was said. I really feel like the people in Russia are so awesome because they are so humble. She even helped us a ton with our grammar and nicely corrected us when we were using the wrong cases with our word or using the wrong sentence structure.

That's about all for this week! the MTC is packed and it's awesome to be around so many missionaries all of the time.

With LOVE,

Cectpa Jenne"

"so we have this same painting but a smaller version in our classroom and we refer to it as the pool party picture because it looks like christ and all his apostles just came from a pool party together and that jesus just towel-whipped the apostle next to him. that might be a little sacrilegious but we think it's hilarious"

Stay tuned!!