Love,
Elder Dobbins
So far today thanksgiving in the MTC has been pretty awesome. Elder Bednar came and spoke to us and we had a live Q&A with him and all of the MTC's around the world. it was pretty awesome. I love elder bednar so much, he is a really awesome man and i can tell that he is called of god as one of the apostles and special witnesses of christ. The MTC is still an amazing place to be. Our group is now the oldest group in the Korean branch. in 18 ish days we get on the plane, its crazy. i cant believe that i will be in korea in less than a month. The language is progressing slowly, but i can definitely tell that i am making great progress every single day. me and my companion had a learning experience yesterday when teaching one of our investigators. oh and by the way elder oaks came on tuesday as well, it has been an inspiring week. he talked about our missionary purpose mostly, and it was great. anyways back to the investigator story. earlier this week our teacher Sister Allen who is an awesome person told us that we need to do our planning better. so me and my companion did just that and for the first time since we have been here planned every single minute of every single day. not a minute was left unplanned. and the nest day was awesome. our investigator lesson went great as well. not only were we able to teach better than we ever had before we committed her to baptism. i mean its not a real baptism, but the principle of it is the same. we also have been trying to get better at setting goals so we can continue progressing and make the best out of our MTC experience. As for christmas i dont have many other ideas other than food and stuff. anything else i probably wont be able to take with me and ill just leave here or throw away. i do get letters and emails from family, i have gotten a few from uncle jim and papa emails me once in a while. i get letters from my dad and the fam all of the time. Mario is doing great. he said that him and his companion are teaching like 20 lessons a week. he is doing great. i saw Elder Giest (Shad) here too. thats crazy how Mackenzie has only a few months left, it feels like she just left. not much else to tell right now, but i really love everyone here at the mtc and im at the point where i actually want to learn this language and it seems completely possible with the help of the lord. not easy by any means but possible. anyways thanks for everything.
Love, Elder Dobbins
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...how many weeks i have been here. the time has flown by and it all runs together now. im still going strong here. the MTC is as awesome as it has ever been and we all continue to learn alot every single day. the Korean is going well. yesterday my companion and i taught a lesson, and for the first time i was actually able to communicate what i was feeling relatively well. we talked about the atonement and faith. something i have come to learn is that the scriptures, specifically the book of Mormon have great power in teaching. they are able to say pretty much anything we cant and are invaluable to the missionaries. our district is doing very well. we are coming closer every day and learning so much. i cant wait to actually get to Korea. it sounds so amazing and in about 3.5 weeks we will be on the airplane to get there. the oldest group leaves on monday, its pretty crazy. they say it doesn't seem real. also it is crazy that we are almost done too. a new group of missionaries also came in yesterday, they are really cool and i like them alot. they are the Taejon/Pusan group like us. i also had my first dream in Korean last night. that was super weird. we were all in class learning something, i dont know what but it was in Korean. crazy. most definitely will not be the last one. other than that this week has been pretty uneventful, we are just focusing on trying to make the best of this short time we have in the mtc. i know that the gift of tongues is real and the lord is blessing us immensely. This is our district and on the right is President and sister Lee it doesn't seem quite real that we are halfway through our mtc experience. i am a district leader now. our district really is an amazing group of people. i am so blessed to have the opportunity to try cultivate a culture of righteousness within our district. with only 5 weeks left here time is really short. Korean is still a work in progress, but each day is a vast improvement. we have gotten to the point where we can somewhat comfortably teach without any notes or anything, but it is still very rudimentary and we sound like cavemen sometimes, but with the spirit it goes well. i still cannot wait to get to korea, but it will come before we know it. in two mondays the oldest group of missionaries is gone, and three mondays after that we are gone. my companion and i had a very interesting experience this past week. we went in to teach one of our investigators, and we had a plan that completely depended on her reading the book of mormon and praying to know if it was true, which she did not do. so our entire lesson was pretty much useless at that point and we had no clue what to do. even more interesting was that there was absolutely nothing that we could say, no ideas, nothing. so after siting there for ten minutes we invited her to church and left. probably the most disappointing lesson so far, and it really bugged me. so i went to the scriptures to find and answer. at first i thought that i might have gotten prideful or something and so the lord was trying to teach me humility, because the language was going well, but thats not the answer i found. i came across Job 1:20 or 21 if i remember correctly and it talked about how the lord gives and takes away. so i thing what the lord was trying to teach me was that i better watch myself and not get prideful, because at any moment he can take his power away. anyways, i love it here and cannot wait to love the people of korea even more than i do now.
i am doing exceptionally well. i still love it here and i would definitely say that the vacation feeling has definitely worn off. the best things that are happening is the blessings that we are getting. the gift of tongues is real and the lord is helping us. the most frustrating thing for me is not being able to say exactly what i want to say, but even that isnt as big of a problem as it used to be. our district is great, and me and my companion get along very well. i love it here at the mtc. only 5 short weeks left its awesome. love, Elder Dobbins 11/6/14 i love it here! so the last draft i was working on the computer froze and i lost it so i will do what i can to let you all know what is happening in the time i have left. life is good here. we are busy all the time but its the good kind of busy. always learning and discovering new things with the language. korean is going well. slowly but well. i can say a lot more that i probably should be able to for being in the mtc only three weeks. this is most evident when we teach our investigators. when we teach them a lot of the times we have no clue what they are saying, but ideas come to our minds that are most definitely from the spirit and it seems that whenever we follow those impressions than we actually answer their question. we got new elders yesterday. they seem like they will be great missionaries but you could tell that they were overwhelmed with everything that was going on. they will be ok though. the motto here is 'make it to Sunday's which is what we tell the new people and what we were told when we were new, but it stick with you just because Sundays are so awesome. by far the best days of the week, because they truly are days of rest. p-days are good too, but Sundays are better. the longest days are Fridays for some reason, but i still like them, because we learn. no such thing as a bad day here in the mission life. you can have tough days, and days where you think you are going to die, but it will never be a bad day. its just not allowed. i like this way of thinking, because if it is always a good day, you seem to act like ti all of the time and it ends up being a good day. don't get me wrong just because it is good doesn't mean that it wont be hard. but it will be possible. the lord will always help us. we got to go to a byu devotional tuesday and brother evans talked about tenacity and how it was vastly important for a missionary to have the ability to see things through to the end and every single second of every single day give it all he has. no regrets. anyways i love serving my mission and cant wait till i get to go to korea and take this wonderful gospel to all the world!!! The room on the first daymy room (before cleaning it)The districtThe badgeElder dobbins and his companion elder newell |
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