Temple Cleaning!

Hi family,

We just finished cleaning the temple for 3.5 hours. It was a great, and really different, experience. They're painting in there, so all the walls are covered and the floor has paper and plastic and everything just seems really uprooted. They gave us white scrubs to wear while we cleaned. The sisters (from our district and a sister going to Hungary and one going to Estonia) cleaned the chandelier in the Celestial room. It was really neat. We also cleaned the wall sconces. We took out all the crystal and cleaned the rods and everything with rags soaked in vinegar, so now our hands are going to smell like that for a while. My guess is that there are over 2,500 individual pieces in the chandelier alone--I'm probably way off, but it was a lot. The elders cleaned chairs and woodwork in the endowment rooms.

I met a guy who served in the Fort Worth mission who remembers y'all. Elder Emery? He was there from 2006 to 2007 I believe and he helped Brother Hoff be baptized--however you word that. He was working in the temple so we talked for just a little bit. There's also a REALLY cute sister missionary going to Fort Worth soon--she has a dark complexion, with dark hair and olive skin. She's really pretty.

This past week was good--can't believe it's flying by this quickly. I feel like I'm working every day but at the end of the day I feel like I could have done so much more. I can't believe how quickly the weeks are coming--I need to learn more Spanish, learn the lessons, learn how to teach by the Spirit. It's somewhat stressful when I think about it, but most of the time I don't think about it. It'll come.

A little explanation about how we're learning here. Two weeks before we got here they changed it up a little bit in the classrooms. Our teachers take on another personality (of an investigator they had in their missions), and we teach them every day (switching off between companionships). So that means that the TRC used to be the most stressful part of the MTC. Now we're teaching progressing investigators every day. Right now we're teaching Jose, Laura, and we'll meet Zarahay tomorrow. We've also taught Cesar and Georgina. We committed a woman named EvaMarie to baptism but I think our teacher thought EvaMarie was too complicated for everyone so she dropped all of us and we just met Laura last week. I hope that makes sense. Hna. Worthen and I extended the baptismal invitation to Jose so now we're working on teaching him everything he needs to know before he can be baptized--chastity, tithing, Word of Wisdom, Sabbath day, the works. So basically every day is stressful because we're teaching in Spanish to all of our investigators and we have to juggle three at a time (at one point we had four investigators). That's the story with our teaching. The brethren were worried that missionaries weren't good teachers, so they're really trying to focus on following the Spirit during lessons and we have to act everything out all the time. I think they've really revamped the program--our teacher (who's highly involved with all the MTC changes) says this is huge. They're also adding an extra hour of personal/language/companionship study time in the morning on our missions for the first three months we are in the field. That should be a really big help.

We had a wonderful fireside on Sunday from an MTC director Richard Heaton. He talked about how we will come to feel great joy in repenting daily. It was a really positive fireside. He said repentance should be a way of life; it's not an event. We should want to repent--it's a wonderful thing. He said it's a privilege, positive, blessing. Repentance allows us to change, to grow, to turn into the arms of safety Alma 34: 15-16. And I also liked Alma 26:22 because it says that he that repents among other things--unto such is given to know the mysteries of God.

Love you all,

kates