May 18, 2015 Missionary Training Experience (MTE)

Hey family how are you doing??

We had a good week this week. Not a whole lot of super crazy stuff happened, but it was still a good week! 

The weather was super Washingtony this last week. There was a bunch of rainy and cloudy days and it even got pretty cold a few times! It was not typical San Diego weather. 

We had MTE's (Missionary Training Experience) on Thursday which is where the Chula Vista English and Spanish Zones and the Sweetwater English and Spanish Zones all met here in our stake center and received some training from President and his assistants. We focused a lot on planning, and how to improve our goal setting and plans for investigators, and how our plans really need to tie into our purpose or in other words how all of our plans should be focused on helping our investigators build their faith in Christ so that they can draw closer to him through baptism. We also talked a lot about teaching short and simple lessons and how they don't really grow their faith while we are there-it's more when they learn and study and feel the Holy Ghost when we aren't there. It was a great meeting. We learned a lot that we are going to put into practice. 

That afternoon and evening we had exchanges. They plan out exchanges and you can end up with anyone from the 4 zones. I went down to San Ysidro, right on the Mexican boarder, in the Chula Vista zone. It was super fun, I was with Elder Shupe for the day. We had served together in the Imperial Valley zone so it was fun working together for the day.  MTE's was great. Nothing to crazy happened on the exchange but it was good to be back in the Chula Area. We were right by the border with Tijuana, we could see Mexico like the whole time! It was pretty sweet. Taught a couple cool people and I even got to help teach an English class. It was pretty fun!  

Friday we got together again and got a little more training. Really focusing on how we can find people who are ready to come unto Christ. We talked about how the Lord is doing the preparing. Our job isn't to prepare the hearts of the people but rather to find those who are already prepared. So we talked about how we need to talk to everyone and also work hard to use the members. Missionary can't progress without the help of you who aren't full time missionaries! So don't be afraid to invite people to do little things!

Those are the main highlights of the week! We have some sweet investigators but there just isn't a whole lot to talk about with them. They are doing good. Not a whole lot has changed in the last week, but slowly I think we are getting more solid people to teach. Yesterday was kind of disappointing, we were supposed to have a bunch of people at church but only one showed up...but It is what it is! We just keep doing our best to find, teach and baptize. Really focusing on finding prepared families.  

Elder Gonzalez and I are doing great. Transfers are next week so we will see if either of us are leaving. We hope not! 

We are going to Sunset Cliffs today which is cool. It's one of the spots that all the missionaries go at least once on their mission. Should be pretty sweet! I'll have some pictures for ya next Tuesday! 

Love you! 

Elder Hansen