Week 2: In Which I Hear the Voice of God

It said "Sister Willis, I love you and you're doing great. It's gonna be okay." It was actually Sister Hampton talking into her water bottle from the top bunk, but that is a minor and barely relevant detail. Sometimes God talks to us through other people.

The people who say time starts to fly after the first Sunday aren't lying. Wednesday through Sunday of last week felt like the longest days of my life. I told my branch president on the second night that I really thought I was going to be confined to live out the rest of my days in the Provo MTC, but yesterday I got an email from missionary travel saying that my time in the MTC is coming to an end and giving me my flight plans! I leave on July 17 with 20 other missionaries to the Calgary airport. 

We've started playing sports with our district during exercise time and it's been so much fun! We played kickball and basketball and volleyball and I actually wasn't all the way the worst! It turns out that your chances of succeeding in volleyball increase infinitely if you actually try to hit the ball. Who knew! As Michael Scott once said, "'"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." -- Wayne Gretzky.' -- Michael Scott." 

On Sunday night we went to choir and watched the devotional by Kelly Mills, who is the director of MTCs. He talked about how the world tries to change people from the outside in but the Lord changes people from the inside out. Then we watched The Character of Christ, which is an old MTC devotional that Elder Bednar gave, which was SO GOOD! He told us that we need to get over ourselves and realize that our mission is not about us! And then he quoted Neal A. Maxwell, who said "The Atonement would not have happened if not for the character of Christ." He said that the character of Christ is that He always turned outward when the natural man turns inward and that the only way that we will ever find ourselves is by losing ourselves. It was SO GOOD and also the only time I've ever heard an apostle imitate the cookie monster: "I want cookie! I want cookie NOW!" It was a good night.

On the Fourth of July we "got" to go to a religious freedom devotional at 9:15 where they showed clips of Elder Rasband talking about how important it is to protect and defend religious freedom. While we watched the clips, they turned off the lights and so we watched the fireworks going off all around Provo out the window. The efy kids wrote "MTC" on the field in lights, which was very cute. Then we got to watch the Stadium of Fire fireworks out the window. We had special permission to go to bed late to watch the fireworks, which was kind of nice, but we still had to get up at 6:30 the next morning, so we're never ever going to make up those hours that we lost. It was a very patriotic night.

Yesterday we took turns teaching our teacher with the rest of the class watching in an observation room, and during our turn she told us that it would be good if we used a scripture to talk about how the Holy Ghost talks to us, so I started looking for the one in 1 Kings, and she was like, "No, from the Book of Mormon." She told us that maybe we could use Enos, which turned out fine expect for the part where the end of the verse talks about God smiting thy brethren for their iniquities, (super good for the first lesson about prayer!), but when we finished our section of the lesson we went back with our district, and everyone was like "we're really surprised that Sister Willis didn't just know a scripture off the top of her head!" So, I have clearly set expectations far too high. 

We watched the "Because of Him" Easter video in one of our classes, which I LOVE and watched dozens of times in the spring, and everyone teased me for smiling so big. What can you do? It's a good one. Highly recommended.

Love you all lots! Read your scriptures & say your prayers

Sister Willis