Sep 18, 2012 (original)

[editor's note: this was written before the previous Sep 18 post, but as he said, he had email issues and couldn't send it]

The biggest change this week is that the older generation is leaving! Most of them left for Taiwan this morning, 15 to Taizhong and 12 to Taibei, which is a good portion of the older generation in and of itself. The Australian elders left yesterday, as they normally do apparently. My roommates, Elder T and Elder H, left with the Taiwanese group, it's going to be strange now having nobody in the hall. Even when we get the new elders and sisters next week, there won't be that many.

This marks the halfway point at the MTC, though! (more or less) Even though I don't feel like I'm halfway through the MTC in terms of the language, I still feel like I know next to nothing. I better start improving my Chinese at a faster rate, otherwise I'm not going to be anywhere close to ready by the time I leave. Wish me luck! Last Saturday at TRC there weren't any surprise meetings like last week, but TRC was still one of the highlights of the week of course. It's nice to be able to relax and teach other people just as who they are.

Elder R and I are SYLing more recently (which we should have been doing from the start). SYL means Speak Your Language, it's that you speak to everybody everywhere in the language you are learning so you can get better. It's hard though. We want to get good at it this week so next Wednesday, when the new elders and sisters arrive, we can SYL 100% of the time, that will be entertaining.

So I've been hearing rumors here and there of current events in the outside world; here in the MTC we are completely cut off except for letters people to send to us. Thanks, Dad, for actually giving me some real information! It would be good if you guys could inform me of these things so I don't have to rely on rumors and gossip, haha.

The highlight of the week was Sunday, as it often is. The Fireside speaker was W. Tracy Watson, the Director of the Missionary Proselyting Department. He talked about the Book of Mormon. He showed us (which made us all kind of uncomfortable) the opening song from the Broadway musical the Book of Mormon, and told us what kind of misconceptions we would have to face as missionaries. He then went on to describe how the Proselyting Department responded to the musical coming out, there were many things he said that I hadn't heard about. One of the most entertaining things was that in the playbill for the musical, they displayed on one of the pages (advertising space and what not) one of the Mormon.org pictures with the jab "The Book is always better," that one was funny. He also shared several personal experiences about the Book of Mormon, and why it is so special to him.

On this note, I guess I'll go ahead and share my favorite scripture(s) of the week. My first one comes from the prophet Jacob, in Jacob 6:12. It goes:

 "O be wise; what can I say more?" 

Those are words to live be, certainly.