Elder Brandon Wallace: Week 3

Wo de jiating,

This wednesday will be week 3 at the MTC. I can't believe how slow and fast this time has been, it doesn't even make sense.

Honestly, my letters from the MTC are gonna be pretty boring for a while, because we do the SAME SCHEDULE EVERY DAY!!!!! AHHHHHHH

But it's all good, I love it here, it's just very repetitive and the days blend together.

Monday, it was rainy and a standard P-day...

yeah...

Tuesday was really awesome. We are now teaching both of our teachers as "investigators" everyday of the week. It's really hard to put together Chinese lessons everyday in the 2 hours or so of study time you would have to prepare. But somehow we're managing. If it wasn't for God's help, there is now way I could ever be doing the things that I am.
Tuesday night was the best. President Russel M Nelson, new president of The Quorum of the 12 Apostles came and spoke to us. It was insanely cool. He is such a spiritual man, and it was awesome to hear his message, and special witness about Jesus Christ. Something really interesting he said is: the main, overarching, reason why the Brethren decided to change the missionary age (which is the reason why I'm writing this email today) is so all of the youth could have a chance to serve if they wanted to. I thought that was really cool.

Wednesday I became a father. Now before you freak out, it's slang that us language speakers use here at the MTC, because we are here long enough to need to come up with stuff like that to keep us entertained! Basically it means, that new Chinese speakers came into our branch and we were no longer the baby district, but now the father district. Our branch is super close. I love my father district, but my grandfather district is super cool, and a lot of them left today which was kind of sad. I mean, it was awesome because they are out in the field now, which is where I'm dying to be, but they did become our brothers and sisters and it's sad to see them go.

Because we ran out of time on Wednesday (due to no fault of our own) we had to teach 2 Chinese lessons to our mudaoyou's (investigators) on Thursday. It went really well. Not much else happened on Thursday because nothing ever happens here.

Friday was standard. Taught more lessons, had 6 hours of classes. Basically like every day here.

Saturday may have been the best day of my mission so far. We SYL'd the whole day, (which means we Spoke Our Language the whole day) and it went really well. I had to Ching-lish it (Chinese mixed with a little English) a little but I did much better than I thought I would. Honestly, my Chinese was the best it had ever been. We also did a TRC in the morning. TRC stands for Teaching Resource Center and basically, return missionaries come and volunteer and we teach them like a home teaching lesson in our language. And then afterwards they grade us on how we did. We did decent, but I'm sure next week it will be even better.

Sundays in the MTC are very long. It's the only day of the week we don't have classes, and so it's filled with lots of personal study time. Which is fine, but it's over 5 hours worth of time to sit there and read the scriptures. We don't practice Chinese on Sunday because I would kill myself if I didn't get one day of a break.
Our choir practice for Sunday was THE BOMB-DIGGITY!!!! We got to practice one of the two songs we are singing with the Nashville Tribute Band next week. It's very different than anything we've heard in a long time. Even though it is a spiritual song, (called John's Song, about John the Baptist) it's pretty folky and upbeat, so it's weird to be singing that after only hearing hymns for a month. This is the first time in MTC history that anything like this has ever been allowed to happen so it's awesome to get to be apart of history. It'll be so solid to get to say "when I was 18 I sang backup for the Nashville Tribute Band!" You should definitely look that song up, and get a taste of what it would sound like when the choir is made up of over 1,000 missionaries.

I found a really cool scripture yesterday, and I wish I would have found it before I made my mission plaque, but oh well, it's still super cool.

It's in 3rd Nephi 5:13 and says:

"Behold, I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I have been called of him to declare his word among his people, that they might have everlasting life." If that's not the definition of a missionary, I don't know what is.

So that's about it. I love you all, and I'm so happy to be here. I have a strong feeling my letter next week will be even shorter because we do the same thing every week.

Wo ai nimen,

Wang Zhanglao

Elder Wallace