January 1, 2015 (Week 2)

January 1, 2015

Half an Elder

Glad to hear you guys on Christmas! I'm glad to hear you guys had a good Christmas and a nice break.  After we talked, we had a sack dinner for dinner, which kinda sucked. Then we went to the evening devotional, where we sung every Christmas hymn for the third time that day. Then they had Hale Center Theater people come sing for us, some lady slowly recount Jesus' birth from the view point of Mary. Not my favorite activity... kinda boring... After that we watched Ephraim's Rescue for the film. That was the highlight of the night. Still working on the companionship.  Also, an Elder in our district from Michigan has no musical taste. He hasn't even HEARD of Bob Marley. We ask people from Germany, Australia, and Korea, and they all know who Bob is, so we give him a hard time about that, haha.  He has barely heard of Journey, Imagine Dragons, doesn't know who Def Leppard, Styx, Boston, or Jack Johnson is... I cry just thinking about it. He listens to musicals and Japanese stuff instead. It's weird...  Another side note, There is a "zone resource" teacher that helps out every other day, her name is Sister Smith. Turns out, she was at Bingham when Brad was there. She saw my name and asked if I knew a Brad Mortensen. We got off talking about that for a while. It was cool.

Friday, our first investigator became our new teacher. His name is Bro. Memmott. He is a great teacher, and pretty funny too. After that, he introduced our new investigator, which is our old teacher. So basically our teachers switched places, and are both teaching... It's weird and it sucks. So now we have to teach two investigators. Everybody else gets to just teach once a day, every day, but we have to teach twice a day, then take a day break. Honestly, that sucks. We get so focused on getting the one lesson down that we are scrambling to get the next one down right before we teach. It's stressful and a bit overwhelming to try and get it planned so we can learn the vocab in time. Last night was one of those nights. We taught in the afternoon, so we didn't have much time to prepare for our evening lesson, and we were trying to teach the Plan of Salvation. Our lesson was basically him reading a bunch of scriptures, and us trying to answer questions. How are we supposed to answer what the spirit world is in broken Korean??? That lesson dragged on due to lack of talking, haha.

Saturday and Sunday were pretty much like usual, just more class and learning. On Monday I thought I was feeling sick and we had to teach twice a day for the first time, so I felt like crap. And because of that I started thinking about how nine weeks here is forever, and two years is even longer... and just random thoughts like that. It wasn't a homesickness, just a sickness of the MTC. One Elder came up to me before class and told me even if I feel like crap, I need to at least pretend to be happy for my companion, so we don't both give up. That really helped me relax and get over myself.

Tuesday was the usual grind until after the night devotional. We had a district discussion about the meeting and during that I read Galatians 2:20. I love that scripture. I truly felt like Christ really did die for me and I owe him my life for that. Later, during my night prayer was a great experience I will never forget. That really helped solidify my testimony.

Elder Mortensen
Jesus Christ
"Last Days Saints Church"

Not much else has happened since then. Yesterday we got our Korean name tags. They say Elder Mortensen in Korean, but they messed up, so all of us get more tags. I'll send one home. In Korea they say Mortensen Elder [In Korean culture, the title comes after the name], but our tags say Elder Mortensen. It's weird, but hey, free tags. We stayed up till midnight for New Years though, haha. I was just writing in my journal with Elder Green from my district, when there were like 7 other elders doing the same thing out in the main foyer, I guess you can call it that. So we sat there and wrote in our journal and talked. One of them is from Hooper, Utah, one from Clinton, Utah, Sandy, and Logan Utah. So many Utah people, haha. It was a fun night.

Right now I'm kinda regretting staying up that late, but oh well, it was worth it.

I'll send pictures home and a couple emails later.

Love, Elder Mortensen

Elder Cazier, me, Elder Hansen, Elder Green, and Elder Carmen