This Week Our World Changed

February 21, 2015

Dear Family and Friends,

The world has changed this week. We entered the Missionary Training Center (MTC in Provo) on Monday. We got our name tags and have been inspired and taught and inspired and taught some more. We were privileged to be there among so many excellent people where the spirit was so strong. Among our training was several roll playing situations that opened our eyes and helped us become effective missionaries. We had fun meeting people from all over going too far away places to serve in many missionary assignments. There were, I think, 36 couples and 8 single women and two of the couples were newlyweds. Some had been on 3 or 4 missions before so we were not the youngest or the oldest by far, but we were beginners for sure. We have emerged from the MTC confident that the Lord will bless us to help him invite others to come unto Christ.

In our district group was a man that had been a convert, a stake president and a Mission president and both he and his wife were PHD professors at BYU. Not only were we paired with them but we were also paired with a wonderful couple from Calgary, Canada. He was a farm laborer and she was a house wife. We totally loved both couples and were inspired by their testimonies. We were inspired by the video clips of the apostles who spoke, including Elder Holland and Elder Bednar and others and by the young people who helped us learn about missionary work. We look forward to three more days of training next week.

We are going to take our testimony and our experience and knowledge combined with our MTC experience and training to Ottawa and dive into the work. We know something about what we will be doing, more than most Senior couple missionaries, but we will not know everything until we get into it and it happens.

We met Sisters Allard who are from Gatineau in Ottawa. One is going to Calgary and one is going to Boston. It was fun to meet them.

We love you all very much. What a blessing it is to be part of your family. We pray that each of you will do well while we are gone.

Love,

Elder and Sister Payne