Week 8 – One of the Greatest Illusions in Life is Continuity

September 18, 2022

One of the greatest illusions in life is continuity. As we approach the end of our MTC stay, I have a ton of mixed feelings. Excited that we are going to the field, nervous about going to Bulgaria, and sacred of this много труден language.

Good news is my visa has been approved and as soon as it gets here I can fly out! They estimate Tuesday the 20th as our departure.

This is my last week as Zone Leader in the MTC. Last Wednesday night we welcomed 36 new missionaries into the branch!! It was a lot!

They are all wonderful people and I’m excited to get to know them as they prepare to serve in their areas.

On Tuesday, we were able to participate in a “Helping Others” appointment. Helping others appointments are practice teaching scenarios for missionaries to practice in their language.

For a long time, the MTC didn’t have anybody that spoke Bulgarian for us to practice on. Thankfully, this last week they hired someone and put him to work! He’s an awesome guy, and is very kind to put up with our very broken Bulgarian.

In Bulgaria, shaking your head side to side means “yes” and nodding it up and down means “no.” Basically opposite of what we’re used to. This is widely considered a bad move and made a lot of people (us) very mad.

We forgot about this fact, and In the lesson we taught, Ivan kept shaking his head after everything we said. Not realizing he was actually agreeing with us, we were freaking out!! It finally clicked for us and the petrifying fear that we had was cleared. That was a fun experience, and it is going to take a long while to get used too.

Last Saturday there was a big home BYU football game. We could it hear the noise all the way in the MTC. My football loving companions were so excited, and we talked about it all night.

After doing our nightly check on all the missionaries, we realized that we could see the stadiums Jumbotron from the window!! Using a phone, we zoomed in and watched the game!! It was amazing!

This week we had the opportunity to hear from Elder Texiria from the presidency of the seventy at our devotional!

My companion Elder Grayson was asked to give the opening prayer, so we got to sit up on the stand. And of course, shake his hand. It was awesome! We have gotten to shake the hand of every speaker that has come, except for Elder Gong, but we were close!