26 Dez (December 26)

I hope you all had a good Christmas! I am going to apologize in advance for some odd grammar things, for some reason this keyboard is set to Spanish and I can´´t switch it back to English, so some of the keys are different, and I can´´t do parenthesis or dashes.

So I wrote to you yesterday about some of the things we did. After emailing time, we had a district meeting, and then we got to walk around the temple. We do that every Sunday afternoon. After that we watched the Mormon Tabernacle Choir program with Sissel, which was really good. In the evening we had a fireside, with Stephan H. Allen as the speaker. He´´s an administrative director person at the MTC. He gave a good talk, he made it kind of light hearted which was rather nice because we were all exhausted after a busy day. After that we watched Mr. Kruger´´s Christmas which was a nice movie, I had never seen it before. It was a pretty good evening.

Yesterday also Elder Bednar gave a really great talk, he talked about how Christ turned outward in compassion and love when the natural man would´´ve turned inward, and focused on himself. He gave a really good impression of the Cookie Monster. ´´I want cookie NOW!´´ Ha. He said that as missionaries, we are here to serve others, not focus on ourselves, and it´´s a very short period of time we have to dedicate ourselves, full time, entirely in serving others. And when we are having a difficult time, to remember we are here to serve others, and not to spend our time worrying about ourselves. He also talked about how conversion is more than just having a testimony. It was a really good talk, and really cool to have an apostle come and speak to us.

Things are going pretty well in general. The language is coming slowly, but I think I´´m making some progress. We finished teaching our first pretend investigator, and we committed him to baptism! Even more exciting than that was the fact that we were able to say enough words to answer his questions and sort of understand what he was saying.

I am sorry this is a little short, I wasted some time because the first two computers I tried, the spacebar didn´´t work, and then I tried to fix this one to get it off of Spanish, but it won´´t switch. See I can type cool characters like ñ and ç. But there really isn´´t much new happening here, that I didn´´t tell you yesterday. I hope you are all doing well, and that you got more snow than we did. It was really warm here yesterday. I love you!

Natal (Christmas)

I hope you all are having a great Christmas! I miss being home, but it's been an awesome once-in a lifetime opportunity to be at the MTC for Christmas. Last night we had your typical Christmas program, with a nativity play, hymns, musical numbers, but not typical because there were two thousand of us there, ha. Then we got to watch "A Christmas Carol" movie and eat popcorn. This morning we had an MTC-wide Sacrament meeting (sixty elders were needed to bless and pass the sacrament!) and Elder Bednar spoke! We just had a wonderful Christmas dinner, with turkey, potatoes, carrots, etc. This afternoon we are going to watch a video of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert, not sure if it was this years or two years ago. Tonight is a Christmas devotional, and then we will watch another movie (probably a church movie).

 I miss being wth you all on Christmas, but they've taken very good care of us here to make it something special. I am sure that this will be a Christmas I will never forget.

I love you all! Enjoy your Christmas!

Quatro Dias na MTC (Four Days in the MTC)

It's been a crazy first week in the MTC. It's been amazing though.

We learned how to pray in Portuguese on Thursday, bear testimony on Friday. Friday evening we taught our first lesson entirely in Portuguese. We were all really stressed and a bit discouraged because we didn't know enough of the language yet to really talk to our (pretend) investigator, and then we had to teach another lesson Saturday morning and there was very little time to prepare. But Saturday went better than Friday and we have another lesson tonight-- Pday ends at fiveish. The language is coming along, but it is hard. I just want to know it already! We try to say all our prayers in Portuguese and talk as much as we can.

Most of our time is spent in class, doing personal study, and studying the language. Yesterday was the best day yet though. We had Sacrament meeting, which was about half in Portuguese, half in English, and then we watched Music and the Spoken Word, and it was the Christmas special-- it was really great. Then we had Relief Society, all the sisters in the MTC. It was a great meeting, the returned-missionary daughters of the MTC presidency spoke about spending Christmas on a mission. One of them had gone to Portugal! She told us about the traditions and food (salted cod for dinner.. don't know how that will be, ha). The talks were all so wonderful and uplifting.We had choir practice in the afternoon, we decided to do the MTC choir and I think it will be a great experience even though I can't sing very well. We are singing a lovely song, we will perform it at devotional tomorrow.

My poor companion is sick, we spent a good part of our P-day in the health office and have to go back tomorrow. I am praying that she gets better soon, and also that I don't get sick. I am doing just fine so far, but I am being very careful. The Elders in our district gave her a blessing. It was pretty sweet to watch, they had never given a blessing before, and were so excited, in a reverant sort of way. It was such a sweet, powerful, and sincere blessing, and I am so grateful to have such wonderful priesthood holders around! They take good care of us, put away our trays in the cafeteria for us and such. They are super young, barely nineteen, all of them.

I love you all! I am so grateful for the opportunity to be here and to serve a mission. Thank you for all of your love and support.

Blog missionário

Sister Julia Vernon is currently serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, in the Portugal Lisbon mission. She left on December 14, 2011, and will be in Portugal for approximately 18 months. Her e-mails home will be posted to this blog to let her friends and family know what she is up to while she is in Europa.