Hello Everyone! It has been a very very long week at the provo MTC. This place is so amazing but I don’t think I have ever been more busy in my life.
Finnish really is as hard as they say it is. It is so brutal (please pray for me). I absolutely love my district. We have so much fun but we also feel the spirit more than I ever have before.
Spiritual Thought: This week we talked about faith a ton. Our district talked about the doctrine of Christ this week and the first step is faith.
I fully believe it is the most important step too because what is the point of any of the other steps if we don't believe they will work/believe in the reason we have the doctrine, which is Jesus Christ. Faith can be hard. Sometimes it feels like our faith is pointless and doesn’t add up to anything. So why try?
I don't know a lot but I know that the lord has blessed me with so much. So so much, I am grateful for that. So for me it is an easy answer. Why do I have faith?
Because Jesus Christ asked me to. Because I love him, I am willing to do what he asks of me through willing joyful obedience.
In church this week we talked about having just a particle of faith like a mustard seed. I've never actually seen a mustard seed but our branch president brought some and man are they absolutely tiny.
After seeing a tiny seed like this I feel like everyone can exercise that much faith.
That is all Christ asks of us, to exercise a particle of faith. Muster(Pun intended) your faith, when you think you can't believe anymore remember the mustard seed. Believe just that much more. Give your seed of faith to Jesus Christ and he can grow it into anything. I love this quote by Elder Eyring “Faith looks like those who give their all to the lord without knowing what all is”.
Being on a mission is literally giving your whole life to the lord for two years, and that's a crazy thing to do. Leaving behind everything else can be so hard. But I have already been so blessed by exercising my particles of faith every day especially when life gets hard. (It feels like I have only been using my brain at 50% power before but now that I am here everything just makes sense. I am better able to remember Finnish, focus on the scriptures and teach others. Those are just a few of the specific blessings I’ve felt in only a week.)
So when your life gets hard, remember the mustard seeds, have faith in Jesus Christ, and have faith that your life can get better. Because Jesus Christ Changes lives through faith.
Short Version of Email: MTC is so busy. Exercise a particle of faith. Finnish is hard but I'm making progress. I love reading emails you send me. Please tell me about your week!
5 Amazing Things of the Week:
1: We have the best teachers ever. Our language teacher is literally a linguistics major which is probably the biggest miracle of all time. Sister Anderson is the absolute best at explaining the 28 steps to conjugating finnish words
2: One of our teachers, Sister Spear who is studying some crazy thing at BYU about the stars (astrophysics maybe idrk) told us that every 11 years the poles on the sun change which causes solar flares which make the northern lights go crazy. This is happening this year in Finland!! Hopefully the northern lights will be super awesome when I get to Finland in about 258392 years.
3: Elder Gong came to talk to us yesterday. He talked about a lot of things but I especially liked when he talked about how as missionaries we “add truths” to what the people we are teaching already know. We aren’t meant to debate or argue. A good reminder to me that the gospel has the most plain and precious truths and a good reminder to you that contention leads nowhere good
4: Teachers love to ask you where you are going and usually they say how amazing the mission you tell them is. But whenever someone (a teacher or corporate MTC person) hears we are going to Finland they just laugh at us and say good luck. Yikes
5: There was a huge thunderstorm last night and my district and I went up to the top of T-3 to watch the lighting.
Miracle of the Week: The lord's promise to “seek not to declare my word until you have obtained it and then shall your tongue be loosed” is so true. There have times this week where I have been testifying and I reference scriptures I didn’t even know I knew which has been so crazy. After I just am like “what the heck did I just say” I know this comes from me studying the word of god so much more than I normally would.
Where I am Right Now: Right now I am in the Provo MTC (This section is mainly for my mom and is boring until I get to Finland)
Scripture of the Week: Jeramiah 16:16
¶ Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.
My Thoughts: This scripture is so cool because it shows a prophecy about how the lord will send “many fishers” and “Hunters” among the land. The footnote for “fishers” is Missionaries!! So Cool to see this happening now with all the missionaries out.
Talk of the Week: Elder Bednar came and talked at the MTC the Week before we got here. Here is the link.
https://www.
My Thoughts: Elder Bednar gave an awesome devotional two weeks ago (I listened to it this week) about how Joseph Smith could not have written the Book of Mormon. It was so amazing to see the differences between Joseph Smith's writing and the eloquence In the Book of Mormon. You should all go listen to his part of the devotional. It is so cool.
If you made it this far please send me an email!! I love hearing about your lives. I miss you all so much but MTC is amazing! Missions are so awesome!
Elder Balls
Funnies from Elder Crossley- Highlights for the week:
- Racing from the 5th floor (Finnish class) to the basement, playing ping pong for 7 minutes, and then sprinting up 5 flights of stairs before the 10 minute break is up, so we don’t have to do push ups.
- Getting locked out of our dorm while we were all in the shower and waiting naked in our towels fighting and trying to figure out who thought it would be funny to close the door (I still think it was Elder Andrews).
- The elevators. Boy, the things that can happen in 30 seconds when 9 plus Elders get crammed into a 8x8x10 box. I'm pretty sure every elevator lobby on every floor up just blinks and wonders what the heck is happening as our laughter warps past.
- We pranked our teacher who said “we just got along better than any district she’s ever seen” by pretending like we just had a huge argument right before class and we were still mad at eachother. She thought it was so funny. We barely pulled it off we were laughing so hard.
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