Week 3 at the MTC: "Best week by far!"

So this week has probably been the best week for me at the MTC.  So first off thanks again for all the letters and packages.  Mom and Dad, I got the package! Thanks so much I have already been eating the snacks!

On Wednesday we had to go to this thing called TRC (teaching resource center) which is where volunteers come to the MTC who are members, less active members, or investigators.  And we have to teach them.  We had to teach two twenty minute lessons and you don't know if they are members or not.  Hermana Read and I were super nervous about it because we were teaching real people.  The investigators that we have been teaching have been our teachers pretending to be investigators so this was scary! We were literally on the verge of tears we were so nervous.  We said a prayer before we went in to teach. We went in there to our first person and somehow we were able to speak Spanish and we didn't use any notes at all.  We were teaching by the spirit, it was amazing! I seriously didn't think I could speak that much Spanish but I did! The second person we taught went super well too! We taught by the spirit again.

The purpose of the TRC is not to judge us on how well we speak the language but they judge us on how well they felt something about the message we shared about the gospel.  We talked about prayer to them and how important it is and we bore our testimonies about it.  They told us that Hermana Read and I did a very good job.  They could tell our sincerity and our strong testimony of the gospel.  It was such an amazing experience.  It gave us a lot more confidence in our Spanish and trusting the Holy Ghost

Later that day we had to teach our investigator which was our teacher Hermano Roden.  We had a lesson planned out and we wrote down what we wanted to say in Spanish.  We went in there and we ended up not teaching him the lesson we planned which means we didn't use our notes at all.  We talked about prayer and taught him how to pray and we shared Moroni 10:4-5 with him.  We challenged him to start reading the Book of Mormon and to pray about it to know that it is true.  We were speaking all in Spanish, maybe one or two words we said in english.  If we didn't know how to say something we would try to figure out another way to say it.  The next day we taught him another lesson and we followed up on the commitments we challenged him to do and we talked about the importance of families and reading and praying together as a family.  We also talked about the restoration a little bit. We also touched on the atonement of Christ and repentance.  He asked us a question "how do we repent?" and it took us a good 3 minutes to figure out how to respond in Spanish.  We didn't know like any vocabulary that had to do with repentance.  But then I started talking and I explained to him how to repent in Spanish.  He understood what I was saying and he said that he would repent for all of his sins.  It was amazing how much the spirit was guiding Hermana Read and I.  At the end of the lesson we bore our testimonies and we committed him to baptism for July 31st and he said YES! We also challenged him to read with his family 2 Nephi:31, it is about baptism.

Hermana Read and I were so happy with how our lessons went with him.  We gave each other a big hug and we had tears of joy this time! It is amazing how the spirit works.  We came to the conclusion we do a lot better when we don't use our notes when we teach that we do a lot better when we teach by the spirit.  We were able to realize that we actually know a lot of Spanish.  It gave us so much confidence in ourselves.  Our teacher Hermana Roden talked to us after we taught him and he said we did amazing.  He said that he could feel the spirit so strongly when we were teaching him and that our Spanish has progressed so much.  He knows that we have struggled a lot with learning the language so he was super proud of us. 

A lot of times we would dread teaching because we felt like our Spanish wasn't that great and that we couldn't communicate as well but now for every lesson we are so excited to teach.  We have a lot more confidence in ourselves now. 

So Sunday, Hermana Read and I had to teach a lesson about the Book of Mormon to our district, its like our Sunday school.  We got to do it English haha.  It went really well and it was a good topic for us because we both have realized how much the Book of Mormon and praying can bless our lives especially when it comes to learning Spanish and teaching by the spirit.  I also had to give the closing prayer in Spanish for sacrament, it went well!

Well I am running out of time but I would like to close with a little Spanish:

Yo se que El Libro de Mormon es la palabra de Dios.  Yo se que Jesucristo es el Salvador.  Yo se que el Evangelio de Cristo es verdadero.  Yo se que Families pueden son juntos para siempre.

I don't know how to do the accents on this computer so hopefully all of you that speak Spanish get the idea haha.  I love you all and thanks again for all the support

Love,
Hermana Veronica Garces