MTC: The First Days

We feel very special as senior missionaries. We are surrounded by a multitude of friendly young men and women who open doors, carry luggage and give us directions. We’ve been told that we can take cuts in line in the cafeteria, but that hasn’t been necessary. At the devotional Tuesday evening the soft seats in the front rows were reserved for us. Nice!

The grounds are beautiful. We are staying in a dorm but fortunately we don’t have to sleep in bunk beds. Since we are able-bodied we are on the third floor. No elevator. No problem.

So far we have learned the missionary purpose:

Invite others to come unto Christ by helping them receive the restored gospel through faith in Jesus Christ and His Atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end.

Short and sweet but it has a lot of meat to it. We have enjoyed the classes and exercises. Today we did role playing which many of the missionaries were quite nervous about. It went fine and was a valuable learning experience. More of that tomorrow. We are becoming familiar with the manual, Preach My Gospel, as it is the basis for the missionary lessons.

We are part of 25 senior couples and 5 single sisters. About half are from Idaho. There are about 1800 missionaries here this week. There will be 2400 by the end of June. We watched the new young elders arrive in the rain today. Each has a host missionary to guide him and the newbies have a colored sticker on their name tag which is known as a dork sticker. That’s not very kind!

Every Tuesday night there is a devotional with a general authority which this week was Elder Richard G. Hinckley. Before getting into spiritual matters, he had some very practical things to say to us. About six months ago there was a pair of elders in Romania who died of asphyxiation in their apartment. It was a very tragic and preventable death. He wanted all of us to promise that we would make sure that our apartments had working CO detectors as well as smoke detectors.

Some of his remarks were aimed mostly at the young elders; he quoted from II Timothy 1:6,7 and said “Don’t try to be cool,” but rather be a representative of the Lord. Use clean and dignified language. The word “dude” isn’t vulgar, but it’s sort of teenage-y.

And above all, preach the divinity of Jesus Christ.