Missionary Training Center and Salt Lake City training

We entered the MTC in Provo on October 14, 2013, and spent one week learning and having great experiences with the “Preach My Gospel” manual. During our time there, we lived at our home: we commuted the 6 miles every day to the MTC and back home at night. The training was very helpful to me because I learned through doing it, that I could teach missionary lessons to the various “investigators” at the MTC. They role-play as investigators, but are really Church members from the community who volunteer to act the part. I had always been scared to approach people about the gospel unless they showed interest first, but I found out I could do just fine and my confidence level went way up!

On Tuesday nights at the MTC, a General Authority speaks at a devotional for the missionaries. While we were there, the speaker was Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. At the MTC, the Spirit of the Lord is so strong and so active in everyone’s life that you can just feel it and bask in it, and learning becomes much easier and we retain the information and feelings instead of forgetting after a while.

We also had a second week of missionary training, but it was in Salt Lake City at the Church Office Building. We were taught how to digitally photograph historical records which are quite old and fragile. Before we began this training, we wondered how just learning to “punch a button on a camera” could require 4 full days of instruction, but we soon found out! The work is very technical and there is much to learn to be able to get the best image possible. We learned how to position the huge camera, focus the lens and how many pixels are needed for a clear image, how to make any needed adjustments in order to have the entire document in the frame of readability. The vocabulary alone was entirely new to us and there was much to learn. Finally on the last day of training, we were tested on being able to do the entire process without any coaching, and Larry and I did it! It felt great to realize that we really could retain the strange new things we had been taught, and then to use them correctly and quickly. Hopefully our trainers in Ohio will feel that we have learned sufficiently.

The only difficult part of the Salt Lake training was the bedtime and wake-up schedule we had to keep. We had to catch the train about 5 miles from our home, at 6:58 each morning, which means we had to get up at 5 a.m.—an unheard-of hour for either of us! The train ride took one hour, then we transferred to the TRAX (like Metro) to get into the city, then walked the 3 long Salt Lake blocks to the Church Office Building. Reverse this to go home at night. Training was from 8:30 to 4 or 4:30. We ate lunch each day in the cafeteria and it was very delicious—I am glad I do not work there every day because it was TOO delicious!

All in all, we met some wonderful people in both training weeks and had lots of fun, too! It’s the best thing we ever did! (That is also what we said about our first mission! Things just keep getting better and better!)