Elder Chase Wilcox in Tokyo: Week #1: The MTC

My emails are basically snippets from my journal each day for now, as I adjust to this missionary life and especially the MTC.

I am beginning to learn Japanese and I feel like I'm back in Spanish 4 teacher while the teacher doesn't speak any English to us and I have no idea what she is saying. My first companion is best choro (elder). I'm trying to talk more then I do right now but still struggling with homesickness and overwhelming work. I know I will get there once I feel more comfortable and get adjusted at the moment I am struggling but know somehow it will simply come and the struggles will pass.

Today I learned about how the Lord strengthens us in a scripture of the day:

9 Thou whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, and called thee from the chief men thereof, and said unto thee, Thou art my servant; I have chosen thee, and not cast thee away.

Favorite word so far is doryoku (Doree yo ku) because it reminds me of what dory said just keep swimming just keep swimming swimmimg....

We learned about how the Lord will strengthen us as we show shinko (faith) inori (prayer) and doryoku (effort)

Each day is better then the last and tomorrow we finally get some gym time or exercise time to break the routine up. I need a little of that each day to keep going. We didn't get that first few days and hoping tomorrow will help me relax more and help me get more done. I realize I definitely have a lot to get done in the nine weeks here.

I have cried and struggled, I knew it would not be easy and that has been confirmed. I guess that's why it's not just anybody's work but the Lord's work.

I learned a lot about hard work this week. But I feel I'm ready to be a senkyoshi (missionary)

Honestly there is a load of stuff to learn, the first days have been overwhelming, but then I adopted a better perspective of making small goals.

Also another thing that came up is that well japan sendai missions have ipads and tokyo japan have android. And when you get advice at the MTC you get it 10 fold by each and every person so I have heard like 10 times you should get this app in the app catalog (ones we can choose from) but nope not on android apparently, its super helpful and crazy good for learning but I find I just do it the old fashion way study the paper.

The other day we got to go to the Provo temple, we just walk across the street and its there. One of the highlights of the day would definitely be when we watched a video that Elder Bednar from where he visited the MTC last Christmas and talked about the character of Christ to give one example of what was said. In Matthew 4 i believe , when Jesus is has just fasted the forty days and forty nights and satan tempts him to summon food, he looks outward and instead of looking on his struggle of temptation he brings himself outward he moves towards others, he seeks to touch the lives of others. The character of Christ was defined is why the atonement could take place and is when the natural man would look inward Christ and his character would look outward. When you think you've worked hard all day and deserve a break the natural man would look inward and say poor me or look at all that I've done, I deserve this, where as Christ would look outward to touch the lives of others. And again another point I summarize, is simply charity is the pure love of Christ and when as the lord suffered on the cross he looked outwards at those who betrayed him and those that hurt him and asked for their forgiveness from his father. Christ looks outward when we would look inward that's what we try to change about ourselves. Our frustration our competitive nature of being the best missionary our worry of not being good enough is not what we should be looking at but instead we should look outwards towards those that we could serve. No matter who they are or how they treated you.

And lucky enough the first week we were there our first Sunday devotional Elder Bednar came and just as awesome we left 5 mins early to get good seats for the devotional and then when we got there they said go put your bags away in the residence so me and my companion had to go all the way across campus to put our bags away and then we were late every seat was taken but as we were leaving to watch it on TV in another room because the devotional center was full, a man said wait and the 8 of us waited there and he got us front row seats so we sat probably as close as possible to Elder Bednar with his family right next to us. So was cool to see them so up close. The apostles you know just on T.V. but his message when he was there was basically to look for our spiritual needs by asking the crowd questions on what we needed and then he asked how can we relate this to our investigators. In short we can see that when we ask investigators questions we get a sense of the spiritual needs they may have in understanding their spiritual needs it not only shows a general concern.

So much happened that I cannot write it all down. But I am getting more and more glad I came. The first night was hard being way from family and friends, shocked me and i didn't know it would hurt that much but with time the pain is still there but I can handle it.