Smoke and Mirrors

This week has been up and down. Truly representative of the MTC life. Emotional highs, and soul crushing lows. Time does not allow me to share even a tenth of the experiences I'd like to.

Yesterday, Hermano Gato came into the classroom and informed us it was officially teaching week. Which meant instead of language study and MDT (see james for MDT) we would be teaching lessons instead. Doing all the stuff real missionaries do. Notice how I said real missionaries. We forget sometimes in here..... Anyways, that meant that our plans for the week were nullified. Which to the casual observer seems like no big deal. But, here planning takes on a whole new meaning. When every fifteen minutes of your day is planned out, you get a little frustrated when the teachers strut in and throw a curve ball like that.

It couldn't have come at a better time. Here we are starved, starved for something ANYTHING spontaneous. You have to realize we live in four places. The classroom, the gym, the cafeteria, or the residence. Thus this place gets in your head. That kind of redundance gets in your head, starts to work on you. You stop remembering who you were before this. Elder Nielson left this week for Russia, which means only Elder Westover remains. He's the only person I knew before this, the only person that reminds me that I lived before walking through those gates. Once he leaves on Tuesday, who knows what will happen. Forget my identity? Quite possible.

I guess what's most frustrating about the MTC is how fake everything is. Now believe you me our teachers hammer against this mindset. "if we teach only fake investigators we are only becoming fake missionaries." I know I know I know I know. But at the end of the day it's just a volunteer, it's just another missionary. Don't get me wrong, the spirit is strong and powerful. The experiences are real. But at the end of the day you still feel lost in a mess of smoke and mirrors, craving something solid to hold onto. Fake food. Fake games. Fake rooms. Nothing feels real except the Spirit.

So you can imagine the prospect of leaving being a welcome opportunity right? Wrong. Roughly ten thousand mistakes stand between me and fluency. Which means I'm in limbo right now between my insatiable desire to leave this place and my fear to step out the door. Quite the kunundrum.

Anyways, teaching week has been crazy. We teach about four lessons daily on top of our usual classes and study. Tons of contacts and commitments. All the goals and numbers are constantly swimming in my head. It's a bit too authentic. But discouraging. Especially when we don't meet the goals. This thing demands planning on a new level. We are literally running place to place. Every second of every day is a valuable commodity not to be wasted.

Once again, too authentic.

Last night I was breaking down at about 8:30. It was post TRC, when I took the spanish lesson in a different direction because I thought I felt the Spirit. Elder Coats was frustrated with me because he didn't know what was going on and said the investigator didn't know what i was talking about. That really got to me. I started questioning wether it was the spirit or not which led to obvious discouragement. Then realizing there was no way we could complete our daily slew of context sat down with my scriptures because I didn't know what else to do. It's times like those you just want a silent room all to yourself to just sit and organize your thoughts. You want a shoulder to cry on. You want to vent for hours to a brother a mom a dad a friend or something. But the MTC is cold. You can't start thinking like that. It's selfish. Cruel, but true. And the only remedy, is to work through it and work hard. Just like an injury on the court.

Suck it up, and walk it off.

The bottom line, this place gets in your head. Missionaries just start to break down like that, happens all the time. It's never quite logical, it's never quite justified, but it's real. We try to support each other, hold onto something amid the firehose of responsibility constantly weighing on us. You have to respect the work, rely on the Lord and the Spirit, or it will destroy you.

Don't believe me?

We see it all the time.

Anyways, we were assigned to be host missionaries, which was admittedly a welcome responsiblity. It hurts though. Seeing those new missionaries leaving their mothers behind. It hit all of us in different ways. In a way it ripped off some callouces. Everyone's been there on that curb at one point or another.

I don't mean for this to be a negative email, I'm just telling it like it is. The MTC is hard. It's rewarding but it's hard. For every triumph, there's a let down to folow. For every success, failure can't be far around the corner. Ecctasy one minute, depression the next. It's life in the fast lane. Life in the paradox. Trapped in a maze of smoke and mirrors. It's the MTC.

The church is true. I know it now more than ever. The Lord breaks us down to build us up.