Elder Thomas Farr: We Say Goodbye to Keith and Our Pet Monkey

Bonjour encore mes amis,

The MTC is officially over and I am so grateful for the experiences I have had over the last six weeks. That said, I am absolutely stoked to fly out to New Hampshire on Wednesday. I had the opportunity to meet my mission leaders over video call and I am so excited to begin serving in the field.

I learned so much this week. We had some super awesome spiritual discussions over the week and I can say for certain that I have felt the spirit more this week than in any other week in my life. Never have I been so spiritually filled. I am so happy to be a missionary.

At the very end of our final class yesterday, we were given a few minutes to kind of write out what we want from our missions. I wrote a lot about personal goals I want to meet and the kind of person I want to be by the end of it all. It made me, and I'm sure a lot of my district-mates, understand that feeling successful on our mission has nothing to do with how many people we are able to convert and everything to do with the personal changes we are able to go through. I am not perfect. Nobody is. But I am ready to dedicate the next two years, and then my entire life, towards coming closer and closer to Christ and his example.

It's always hard to say goodbye to people you care about. I have come to truly love these people and this whole thing feels very much like the end of an era. The hardest thing I have had to do in the last six weeks is logging off of those final zoom calls. That gives me a lot of excitement for the connections I will make with people in the field over the next 23 months.

Elder Card and I had the opportunity to teach a couple more TRC's this week. We had one in French a few days ago and, while it was pretty rough, it was super cool to see how we were able to throw out our planned lesson to try and teach our ami what the spirit told us she needed to know. That was a huge testimony builder for me.

The district got to do a lot of fun things together this week. Of course we have our regular hangouts but I think the comedic highlight of the week for me was a Kahoot that Elder Card and I made for class. We were assigned to lead a grammar review for the class and decided to make a Kahoot (for those of you who don't know, a Kahoot is basically a quiz game that lets you create quizzes for whatever the class needs to learn/practice). We spent two hours in companion study that morning figuring out how we could make the Kahoot as entertaining as possible, random stock photos and all. In case you were wondering, it was a huge hit. We had a lot of fun with it.

Two more things to explain some of the below pictures:

1. A big inside joke among the district was started by my fantastic companion, Elder Card. The joke was centered around his dream to one day have a pet monkey (things are funny in the MTC that aren't funny anywhere else).

2. There's an MTC employee who watches the videos of our classes to make sure we stay on track. Somehow, we found out his name is Keith. Over the weeks, we have all become more and more obsessed with Keith. We don't know him, or even what he looks like, but maybe that makes it better. We've had many a one-sided conversation with Keith, personified by the little blinking red light in the corner of all of our classes. Anyways, we had to draw and label the human body in French and affectionately named him "Keith". We love and miss you Keith.

The next time you hear from me, I will be a few days into my stop off in New England. Needless to say, I am beyond excited. Please pray for my French, lol.

Au revoir et bonne semaine mes amis,

Elder Farr