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Saturday, December 6, 2014

Movie night, food insecure, joyful noise, be still my soul, one-on-one





1 December 2014


Hi! 

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving! Ours was awesome here. 


Movie night and Christmas lights
On Thanksgiving night, we were able to watch the new movie "Meet the Mormons" and they passed out a bag of popcorn to every single missionary! The movie was great. I thought it was really uplifting and also funny :) I'm glad I could finally see it. After the movie as we were walking out, they handed all 2000 of us missionaries a candy cane and then on our way back to the dorms we got to see the Christmas lights. They went all out! All the trees are decorated and it's so pretty. Everyone went wild on Thanksgiving--people were shouting and singing and laughing...
Assembling food packages to serve community members



Serving "Food Insecure"
During the day we had the opportunity to assemble little food kits for the Utah Food Bank. This made me feel a little more at home because every Thanksgiving with my Grandma we serve lunch to the homeless, so I felt like I got to do that in a way with my family still.  We assembled over 350,000 casserole kits for 'food insecure' families which made us all really happy.


A Joyful Noise
My scripture for the week is Psalms 100 and it is perfect for wrapping up Thanksgiving: 

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.
Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing. 
Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. 
Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name. 
For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truthendureth to all generations.

An Answer to Prayer
Elder Bednar came on Thanksgiving! For those of you who don't know who that is, he is one of the twelve apostles of our church so is like a celebrity in the Mormon world. But he really is an incredible person by any standards. He is a fantastic speaker -- he speaks boldly, simply, and clearly and he is a deep thinker.  He and his wife came to speak to us for the devotional on Thanksgiving and it was amazing! I was so so so excited! 

MTC missionaries at Elder Bednar's talk
I wish I could type a transcript of everything he said, but some of the things he said were definitely an answer to prayer for me and helped answered things that had been on my mind. 

Yesterday, Sister Sheri Dew came and spoke to us in Relief Society. Again--incredible! There are some people who speak and you look at your watch, and you zone out, but then there are some people who talk for an hour and it feels like it was only 15 minutes and you wish they could talk all day! She's one of them. She's absolutely amazing and we're so lucky here in the MTC that we have so many awesome opportunities to hear from all these people. 


Be Still My Soul
We're really on a roll this week because last night, Vocal Point came! Again this might be another "Mormon bubble" thing but they're an a capella group and they're really good! You can find them on youtube :) They sang to us for last night's devotional -- "Be Still My Soul". They have the voices of angels. It was so powerful to hear them live and to hear their testimonies before each song that they shared with us.


One-on-One
My last highlight from the week is doing interviews. Recently my companion and I were called as Sister Training Leaders (we're responsible over all the sister missionaries in our zone). So we conduct interviews each week to see how the sisters are doing and to try and help give advice for any problems they might be having (obedience, homesickness, language, getting along with companion, etc.) It was so fun for me to be able to talk to them one-on-one and get to know them better. Each time I walked out of the room and looked at the time I was always amazed at how long I could talk to them for and how quickly we could connect even though we came from different places in the world and previously didn't know each other. I'm excited to get to know them and they're all wonderful. 

Love and miss you all! 
Sister Hancock

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