The MTC: Spiritual Growth and Shower Pranks

Hey everybody! This is Parker here, in my fourth week in the MTC, and I'm having a blast! The spirit here is incredible. Every devotional, sacrament, every lesson we give to a fake investigator is such a learning and spiritual experience! That part of the MTC is great, though I'm getting very tired of the food. Learning French is amazing. I wonder at how much we've learned in these past three weeks, I know there's no way I could have done it without the spirit of the Lord. He has helped me so much here in the MTC.

We had a little scare earlier this week. About half of the missionaries going to France got very sick in our zone, including my companion, so that was scary. But I didn’t get sick, for which I am grateful.

My district leader played a hilarious prank on the incoming missionaries on our floor the other night. They all came in, and he took his journal out and explained that he was the shower manager for our floor, and that we need to sign up for shower times around fifteen minutes each. Because they were stateside missionaries we could only give them times on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. All of my district would go out there at different times asking him questions about our shower times and when we could shower, if we could trade times, if we could sign up for a different one, that kind of thing. In reality, you can shower either when you get up in the morning or when you go to bed, it doesn't matter, but we had them good and convinced! We informed them that unfortunately we weren't informed ahead of time of their arrival, so we had to give them the 5:30 in the morning time, a whole hour earlier than required to get up. This elicited groans of distress and pain so comical we were dying laughing in the room. We tried to be quiet, but our district leader kept a straight face and told them sorry, they had the 5:30 time. We told them half an hour later right before bed time that we were joking. They had their alarms set already, and they were not happy, but we were laughing.

I'm growing so close to God and my Savior here, it’s amazing. I know with such a strong and unshakable testimony that God loves me, and that Jesus died for me, and that because of that, I can live with him again. I'm grateful for that.

We're psyched this week, we get our travel plans on Friday!!!!!!! I hope everyone is doing good at home, miss y’all! Au Revoir!