Care First and Then They Will Listen

Hola family and friends!

This week has been long and eventful for me. I reached my one-month mark in the MTC, and I learned a lot about a lot of things. I'm loving the MTC, and I'm really grateful that I got a language for my mission, if only to be able to be in this place for 9 weeks instead of 3!

I had a cool experience this week in the RC (Referral Center), which is where we make calls to follow up with people who ordered free Bibles, copies of the Book of Mormon, or church videos, and we make sure that they receive them and bear testimony about the principles in those things and the restored gospel. So one of the calls I made was to follow up with a lady who had ordered a Book of Mormon, and her husband answered the phone and was a bit rude in asking who I was and why I wanted to talk to his wife. I explained that I was calling as a representative of the church, and was just following up to see if his wife had received her Book of Mormon. The man told me that his wife had been in the hospital for a few weeks, and from his tone of voice it didn't sound too good. I did my best to try and be human instead of following my script, and tried to sympathize and really care. It was interesting because when I did that he really softened up and accepted more of what I was saying. Because of the situation, I wasn't able to bear a powerful testimony or get a commitment to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it, but I did learn a valuable lesson about people, that when they can tell that someone genuinely cares about them, they become much more willing to listen to what that person has to say. Also, I hopefully planted a seed, and who knows if because of that the wife and husband might actually read the Book of Mormon to find out what our Church is all about. :)

It's really nice having gym for an hour almost every day here. In spite of the terribly unhealthy food here I think I'm actually getting in better shape! I've been running a few days a week and I'm up to about a mile and a half, and that should hopefully get longer soon as my heart and lungs adjust to the altitude better. I've been told that if the doctors here had it their way, we wouldn't even have a gym period because of the frequency of injuries, but I really think it's one of the most important aspects of our learning here. The day where my district has gym as the last thing before bedtime, the missionaries start acting like the 6 and under age group on the swim team right before practice. :) You just have all this pent-up energy from sitting in class and studying all day, and a lot of us start fidgeting around and doing immature things like a 6th grade boys history class. We've been playing volleyball against the other districts recently, and we've beat everyone so far. We did lose one game, but it wasn't really fair because our sister missionaries played on our team and some other guy joined the other team and played with them even though they didn't want him and he wasn't in their district, and he was just pounding the ball toward the sisters and really exploiting that weak spot. However, we had a rematch a few days later without those things, and we beat them 3-2 in a best out of 5 matches game. Our district is solid, and we don't have any weak spots even though none of us are incredible volleyball players.

Missionary work is the greatest thing on earth! Helping people experience the gospel so they can receive the fullness of the atonement is the greatest feeling in the world, and I wouldn't trade this opportunity for anything. I love you all, God bless you and thank you all so much for your prayers and support!

Elder Damon Janis