3 more weeks!

So, it struck me recently that I only have three more weeks here at the MTC! Where have the last 6 weeks gone? At the same time, it seems like I've been here for 5 months. The MTC does weird things like that to your perception of time. Anyway, so I'm just slightly freaking out a little bit because I know I have a lot more to learn before I leave. But it's all working out.

This week is Mission Presidents' Seminar, so I got to meet my mission president on Saturday night. He is Filipino, and he's really nice. He gave us the opportunity to ask him any questions we had about the Philippines or our missions. We really should have come up with questions ahead of time, but we didn't think of doing that. Oh well.

Teaching has been getting better for me and my companions. Every day our teachers play the role of investigators and we have to go teach them. Brother Langer is playing the role of Jeffrey, and Brother Ward is playing the role of Omar. We teach them every day. It's really interesting because, even though we know they are really our teachers, it feels like they are real investigators when we teach them. It's really cool. We've been improving a lot in our teaching. When we first started, we basically just wrote down what we wanted to teach and read it off the page, and we didn't really try to ask questions because we were afraid we wouldn't understand the answers. But now we teach a lot more by the spirit, and it's amazing that we can actually understand and speak enough to ask questions and let that sort of guide our lessons a little bit. It's hard, and sometimes our lessons flop, but if the spirit is there, it always works. We're really trying to help our investigators understand revelation right now because it doesn't seem like they're really getting it yet. We spent the whole lesson yesterday with Jeffrey trying to help him understand that we ask him to read the Book of Mormon, pray, and go to church because that's the way he can receive revelation. It's a really great experience being able to teach like that in the MTC.

On Sunday night, we watched a recording of a talk that Elder Bednar gave at the MTC a few years ago, entitled "Character of Christ." It was absolutely the most amazing talk I have ever heard. He said  the character of Christ is that He turns outward in compassion, love, and service to others when the natural man in each of us would turn inward. He gave lots of examples from the scriptures. It really made me want to be better. He also suggested a really cool way to study the scriptures. He suggested that we buy an inexpensive paperback copy of the Book of Mormon and read it cover to cover, and mark it up according to a question that we are trying to research, and then when we finish, to write a half page summary of what we learned. He suggested that we do it over and over with new copies of the Book of Mormon. I thought it was a really cool idea.

Last night, we had a really good lesson. It was about the role of the Holy Ghost in conversion. The spirit was there really strongly, and by the end even the elders were crying. It was the sweetest thing I've ever seen. 

This morning we went to the temple as a district for the last time. The temple is going to be closed from July 2- July 23, so we'll be gone before it re-opens. It was so good to go to the temple together.

Well, I'm about out of time. I'm excited because we're pretty sure President Uchtdorf is speaking at the devotional tonight! :)

Thanks for everything! I love you all!

Love, Sister Lisa Boekweg