Sziasztok!

Sziasztok!!

This week was great! So Thursday we celebrated Thanksgiving and we had a completely different schedule all day! Change is sometimes nice. It was our zone's turn to host the MTC staff's Sacrament Meeting and I got to give a talk in English!! Each Saturday night before the next day's normal Sunday services, we all have to prepare a talk in Hungarian and then during the meeting we find out who are the two elders/sisters that have to actually give their talks. In theory, everyone will have written nine talks by the time we leave the MTC but I usually just hope and pray that they don't call on me because I usually have only written about two Hungarian sentences down the night before. But for this particular circumstance, the branch presidency gave me a week's notice to write a talk in English! It was nice to actually be able to express my thoughts on the gospel for once, rather than being extremely limited in what I say by my extremely limited Hungarian. Last Wednesday, we got two new Zusters in our district. They are super funny and we all get along smashingly. They do think that we all are really weird but that's what being in the MTC for 7 weeks does to you. When you are a missionary, you really do think that everything is funny. I think that I have laughed the hardest I have ever laughed in my entire life here.

On Thursday, we celebrated Thanksgiving and we didn't have class all day! We had three devotionals throughout the day, the first by Neil L. Andersen of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, the second by our MTC presidency, and the third, a performance by missionaries at the MTC. I had the possibility to perform on the piano for this last one with the MTC choir. It was great to be playing the piano again for a little bit! The performance also included a very cheesy, just generally badmissionary play, a Polynesian song and dance group, a Korean dance group (these both consist of missionaries from these countries), and a Bluegrass band! Afterward, the MTC finally turned on all of the MTC Christmas lights and we went out and took pictures (below) and sang carols. Fuchs Elder and the Zusters and I even got a picture with some of the MTC Presidency, including Sister Bertasso and the Snows! We ended up having our Thanksgiving feast at lunch. It was pretty good; definitely a step above what we usually eat. We also had the possibility to participate in a service project in which we bagged around 350,000 meals for hungry children in Utah (Fuchs Elder and I are pictured below in our blue caps. We did this in the cafeteria).

On Friday, Fuchs Elder and I taught a real Hungarian over Skype! So usually when we teach real Hungarians, the language barrier is still a very real and terrifying thing. But with Skype, we also had visual and audio barriers. When we first got online with her, she said something to her, and Fuchs Elder looked to me for the translation and I looked to him with fear in my eyes. We didn't really know what was going on at all, but after about 10 minutes we got into the swing of things. Also her young son was trying to wrestle her to the ground to entire time so that was another barrier. But the Spirit comes in to save the day every time and we ended up having a really good lesson with her about gratitude.

The other day we were having a lesson about faith and one Elder was talking about how faith doesn't come from us. Faith comes from God. This was really important for me to hear. I believe that when we understand that concept, that faith doesn't have to come from some deep, obscure place inside of us but it can be a blessing from above, we realize that really do owe God and Jesus Christ for everything we have. That's why gratitude is so important and why Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays!!

With love,

Martin Elder