Sept 2, 2017

Hey Everyone!

   Wow, this MTC thing has gone by super fast. I leave at 4:40 on Sunday afternoon for the airport, and spend about 24 hours total traveling, but only about half of it is on a plane. Sounds like lots of people in airports are gonna hear about the Gospel! And I realized something else this week. I feel like I can do ok with french.... if the only thing we talk about is the Gospel, haha. Hopefully no one talks to me about normal everyday life stuff, because I'll have no idea what's going on. But I'm actually way excited to get out there and start speaking French. I might have a different attitude about it next week though, haha. 

   So we had in-field orientation yesterday, which was awesome! They took us to lots of different rooms and taught us different stuff and had us practice different things, and I really liked it. Two things really stuck out to me that I want to share. First off, is that I'm actually going to go up to random people and talk to them about the Gospel. I always thought that it became easy to do that once you put on a missionary name tag, but for some reason I'm still a little nervous. I'm sure it'll be easy once I actually do it. Right? And second is how important members are to the missionaries. Did you know that in the United States, an investigator is twice as likely to be converted if they were found by a member? And if I remember right, an investigator who was found by a member has a 59% chance of joining the church. That's a lot higher than the number of investigators found by the missionaries. But missionaries find way more investigators then members do. That's kind of not the best way to be doing this so I have a challenge for you. I challenge each of you to start a Gospel conversation with a non-member friend. And if you are really brave, invite them to meet with you and the missionaries for a discussion. If the statistics are right, at least half of you will end up helping this friend get baptized. But hey, if you are scared, and you think staying in your own comfort zone is more important than helping a close friend have eternal salvation and have the opportunity to live with their family forever, that's your choice, not mine. And if you are reading this right now and happen to not be a member, I challenge you to talk to a member friend about having a discussion with the missionaries. The worst that can happen is that you hang out with your friend and a couple missionaries for a little bit, which isn't terrible. Have fun being missionaries everyone!

   Something a little funny happened this week. We were sitting at lunch, and I was next to Braden's companion Elder Ashworth. He was talking about Tahitian, and how confusing it is. He was saying how lots of the words are just random other words put together and it is super weird. He used the example of window, which in Tahitian translates to something like "make light." After he said that I just looked at him and said "Butter. Fly." He just froze for a minute while her was trying to wrap his brain around that, but the funniest part was Elder Lerohl's reaction. He died of laughter, and it was way funny. I've never seen him laugh that hard, and he couldn't stop. I'm not trying to toot my own horn or anything with this story, I just think it was funny that Elder Lerohl laughed so hard to that stupid joke. This probably isn't super funny in email form, but it was pretty great.

   As I said, I'm leaving this week, so I'll talk a little bit about that. We are at the airport for almost four hours before our plane leaves, then we fly to Arizona. And from there we go Florida, and then to Barbados. None of the flights are more than about 7 hours, but we have about three or four hours in between each flight to just chill in the airport and teach the Gospel to people. Also, for the 5 or 6 of you who might care, or who made it to the bottom of this email, my next P-day will most likely be next monday, so a little bit more than a week from now. But I'm not sure. And luckily for you they will probably put a time limit on my emailing, so these will probably be shorter from now on. I know this church is true, I know that God loves us so much, and even though I love the MTC, I can't wait to get to barbados!

Love, Elder Kerr