1st P-day at Home MTC

1st P-Day at Home MTC

Hello everyone! It's safe to say that I am much closer to home than I had anticipated being 3 days into my mission. The online MTC experience has been an interesting one thus far! I wake up at 6:30, get ready, do my personal studies, then my companionship studies, then the rest of the day so far has been fair game. I will have at least one class with my district of 12 missionaries, including myself, that usually takes about 3 hours. Then I will usually have a workshop which is kind of an online seminar with other missionaries. On Wednesday, there were 270 missionaries present in the workshop. They had all either arrived at the MTC that day or had begun their online training. Yesterday the workshop had about 70 missionaries and should have about that number until I complete my training. 

My companion is Elder Eckhart, he is from a small town about an hour east of Sacramento California. He's a good kid and we get along well. We are excited to teach and work together. We have an assignment to teach Justin (a fictional character made up and played by one of our teachers, Brother Watson), on Saturday night. We "met" him yesterday and are starting to form a lesson plan between us. Our teachers are Brother Watson and Sister Marion, they are both really cool and easy to work with. The part of this home MTC experience that has been the most difficult for me is managing my downtimes. For example, yesterday's classes ended for the day at 4:30, the rest of the day was up to me. I had filled earlier downtimes by watching the Book of Mormon videos, which I had finished the first day of my mission. The only instruction we had received was to not do anything that "distracted from our missionary purpose". I truly want to be as obedient as possible because I know that obedience brings joy to missionaries, but I was bored stiff last night. I can only imagine what my friends and other missionaries around the world who are in quarantine are going through. 

Today was my first P-day and I felt good enough about it to go fishing with my dad. It was good to get out of the house and to spend some time with my dad... also I caught a really nice rainbow trout. In addition to it all, I have been feeling pretty sick lately. I think I might have a cold and I hope it blows over soon because it has been more of a distraction and a disturbance than anything else. I told my mom that with the virus going around, I have never washed my hands more, and sanitized more than I have in recent weeks than I ever have in my whole life, and yet, I still get sick. But so far, it's been a great experience! 

In Wednesday night's workshop our teacher shared a good message with us, he told us that the missionaries participating in the online missionary training program have more agency and more responsibility than any missionaries that had ever been called since the formation of the church. I am grateful for this opportunity to be a pioneer in this new way of training. I know the trust that the Lord has for me and my fellow missionaries. I am so grateful and excited to be serving the Lord as a missionary. The Church of Jesus Christ is most certainly the true church and I know that with the changes occurring all over the world, this is where the Lord wants me to be. If a traditional training experience was in line for me, I would have left last week. I know I was called for this time specifically and I am excited to see what the future holds. More next week!

From far away Rigby Idaho,
Elder Oswald



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