#3 Sacrifice

I can't even believe it! He's been out for almost half of the time spent in the MTC. In about 3 weeks he will be going here:)

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What use to be an at least 9 week amount of time spent in the MTC has now been cut down to 6! Can you even believe that these young missionaries are able to learn so much in so little time? The spirit is truly with these missionaries. In the next few emails we will probably learn about his flight plan. As Elder Creager said, "It's like a mini mission call" so that will be super exciting for him. Here's what was going on this past week.

Well day 17 of the MTC has begun! The MTC experience for district 16b is almost halfway over. Here's some crazy stuff that's happened since last week.
Elder Neil Anderson the apostle came and spoke to us on the Tuesday night devotional at the Marriott center. Gave a great talk that was of course on missionary work, the title of the talk was love and sacrifice heres a few quick lines form his talk. "we sacrifice what we love, and love the things we sacrifice for", "you might never know what impact what you say has on people" As missionaries sometimes we never see the results of the work we do, and sometimes its that way in life to. Its just a witness to me that you always do your best because you never know what impact your words might have on the lives of others. At the end of the talk, the MTC presidency told us to stay in our seats because there was a thunderstorm outside with some lightning. So for about twenty minutes we sat inside the marriott center and sung hymns. Elder Anderson got up and started shaking some hands. Some sisters in our district were one person off from shaking his hand, and some other sisters in our district got to shake his hand. It was really cool. Now it is just a handshake but an apostle is a special witness of Jesus Christ there are only a few of those on the entire earth.  After Elder Anderson shook some hands they let us leave, it was still raining outside so we got pretty soaked on the walk back to the MTC.
Our building here at the MTC is very old, there going to be tearing it down in a few weeks, so we might have to move buildings, which could be interesting, there were some workers at the res. yesterday talking some measurements but hopefully we're out of here before they tear down the building. (That way we won't have to switch buildings) We got a new district in this week, and the districts who have been here 4 weeks got there flight plans. Time goes by so fast here.
The language is actually getting much easier. I was struggling a bit this last week everyone in our district was. But after some prayer and some lessons on sentence organization I'm feeling really good about it. Something that I never understood until now is that sentences are organized differently in other languages, memorizing words isn't all that hard but forming sentences is what takes a little more work. I"m shooting for memorizing  40-50 words a day, we'll see how it goes.
I'm looking forward to the Temple, we go every Saturday as a zone, the temple is really a place where we can learn. It's one of my favorite times of the week.

One more thing, In the time my companion and I have been here we've seen two of the Elders who our in "The District" and our now returned missionaries, both of them work at the MTC. People might not recognize them outside the MTC but there famous inside it.
I hope I'm writing some things that will help you. The MTC is something you can't understand unless you've been here. Tell Grandpa Kelsey thanks for sending a me a dear elder, mail is always great. *(shout out to Grandpa)

Until next week:
Your son and your brother

Elder Creager

"we sacrifice what we love, and love the things we sacrifice for", "you might never know what impact what you say has on people"

Work hard Elder! You will have an impact on others without even knowing it...You've already impacted us:)