Week 4!

Hello Meu Amigos! (My Friends)

With week 4 behind me now here in the MTC, I only have two weeks left before I'm out in the real world! It doesn't seem like its real at this point!

The last week went by pretty quickly, and fairly uneventfully! Everyone in the new zone is basically best friends by now, we have a lot of fun! My companion is awesome, which just makes everything so much better. All the other guys in the residence are just as cool though! There is one elder, Elder Smith, who is just super chill and every time you look at him he is either doing push ups, sit ups, or pull ups. Its low key impressive. 

Classes have been going good as always. Since I'm by myself I'm progressing fast, and so the teachers are focusing a lot more on learning the doctorine and coming up with new ways to challenge me which is really cool. To put it in perspective, most groups have 2 "investigators" (teachers who act) at a time that they teach. Well I have 4 "investigators" and one "less active" member that I teach every day so its just a lot of fun! Its really strange because while a lot of the teachers are Seniors at BYU, a lot are also freshman who are my age and just got back from their missions a few months ago. This is honestly cool because it makes all of our professors a lot more relatable at least to me. Whenever I'm bored and I don't have a teacher I usually just go find a professor to hang out with and practice Portuguese. 

So in the MTC every Sunday night we watch church videos after devotional. Last night we decided to go to see Meet the Mormons 2. It was the greatest, Elder Smith and I laughed so much we cried! The last part of it was all about this family group in japan that are famous pop stars, and at first we were all stoked because we got to hear some music other than Mormon Tabernacle Choir for a change, but then it got so much better. The group was called Bless4, and they are literally a mix of N'Sync, the Jackson 5, and Backstreet Boys, with a little bit of Japanese culture thrown into it! It was an incredible story to see how they decided to put their beliefs ahead of their musical ambitions, but it was so fun to watch the clips of their music videos and stage performances. Definitely quality entertainment.

There were two main spiritual high points from this last week: 

1) A quote from Meet the Mormons 2: "It is easy for us to say 'That is just who I am, it isn't going to change' but Jesus underwent his experiences so that he could help us through the changes we need to make. Who you are is not who you could become."

2) If you have not yet seen the Mormon message where Elder Jeffery R Holland bears his testimony on the Book of Mormon, I make that my challenge to everyone to go watch it. It is one of the most powerful and logical testaments I have yet seen. It particularly spoke to me because I myself am a very logical person. I like to understand things, and when Elder Holland spoke about how no human being on this earth would have endured the torture and persecution that Joseph and Hyrum Smith endured, unless they had such a firm knowledge of its truth that they would have seriously feared for retrobution from God if they denied what they knew. 

Other than that nothing particularly special happened this last week. I have attached a couple pictures to this email from our temple walk yesterday. 

I hope everyone has a truly inspirational week! I appreciate hearing from all of you, and please forgive me if it takes me a week or two to respond to your emails!

I love and miss you all!

Elder Ferrell

Pictures: 

1) Elder Smith and I in Deep Contemplation

2) Myself in Deep contemplation

3) All the Elders in the New Zone

4) Waving Hi to our Moms

5) Smoldering Group Shot

6) Me with the Elder who is from East Fortaleza Brazil and was here learning English.​​

7) Solo Picture

8) Elder Tolento and I