Elder Matua: Week 6

It was pouring rain walking back from class

Very uneventful week this past week in the MTC. Been here six weeks now and nothing has changed. It's breakfast, class, lunch, study, dinner, class.

This past week, two districts from our zone headed out to the field. Was a sad week with them gone because we had all made super good friends in that group. But the good thing is that we are the oldest now! It is still weird to think we have been here for six weeks. Feels like six months but at the same time feels like six days.

On Thursday our district decided we would do an English fast. ALL DAY! The worst part is in our district, there is four different languages being spoken and there is only 9 of us. So none of us understood each other but now we are all really good at charades. It was so hard to not speak English because we don't know near as enough Ukrainian to just speak it. But at the same time we realized how much we do know and how much we've progressed. That night we talked about it and we realized how much it helped and we made a commitment to do it every night from 9:30 to 10:30, right before we go to bed. It has been going well and actually paying off a lot.

My new tag

Elder Howard and I taught our first skype TRC. We taught a guy named Nickolas. He was super cool! Born and raised in Ukraine and now he is serving our military. It was good to actually hear a native and he helped a lot with our pronunciation and other tips for Ukrainian. We have about 3 more of those skype TRC's and I can't wait they are super fun.

These last couple weeks have been very stressful and overwhelming. Always telling myself that I am not doing enough, what am I doing wrong everyone is learning the language faster, I need to do more, I need to try harder. Because of this I started to study so hard and work myself to death with language and studies and everything else. But I didn't see anything getting better, if anything, it was getting worse. I flipped open my scriptures hoping and praying to find an answer. I opened up to D&C 10. Joseph Smith is an amazing, amazing man and I thank Heavenly Father for him and what he did for us everyday, but he is human just like the rest of us. And reading in chapter 10 I just got the sense that Joseph Smith was soooo overwhelmed with everything the Lord was asking him to do. And then I read verse 10: "Do not run faster or labor more than you have strength...but be diligent to the end". The Lord expects so much from us and we can't do anything without His help. But in the scripture he reminds us to do everything we can but to not do more than what is expected. And to just work hard and be diligent. I testify that no matter how hard things get in life we can turn to the Lord and ask for help, I know that if we are diligent in anything the Lord will provide a way.

Love and Miss y'all

Старійшна Матуа