Sister Brylee Lewis: "The Most Uneventful Week in the History of the MTC"

Ahoj!

Welcome to another week of pretty much nothing exciting happening at the MTC. I literally can't even think of anything that went on.

The other day the elders in my district were pronouncing all of our names like you would if they were Czech names. They figured out that mine would sound like "Levis," which sounds pretty close to "lettuce." So I'm now stuck with the name "Sestra Lettuce" for the rest of my mission haha.

I've also gotten another name, but this one comes directly from a Czech person. We have TRCs, which is where we teach member lessons to RMs. One of the people we teach is actually from the Czech Republic. His name is Petr, and he's freaking hilarious. I love lessons with him. Well in the past few lessons with him, it always ends up being Sestra Johnson's turn to pray, so I always point to her when it comes time to pray. Petr thinks that's hilarious, and now he calls me "Sestra šefka," which translates to "Sister Boss" or "Sister Bossy." Thanks, Petr.

Here's a little Czech lesson for you. I'm gonna copy a few sentences from our grammar book just to prove how whack Czech is.

"Nouns for males are normally masculine. Nouns for females are normally feminine. With some words for animals the gender is clearly specified. Words for the young of animals are usually neuter. For other kinds of nouns you need to learn the gender as you go along. Luckily, most of the time there are some quite good rules about how to guess this. Masculine animate nouns are usually deducible from the meaning. They usually end in a consonant."

So basically Czech is just a language of exceptions. Every time we learn a rule they give us a huge list of exceptions to go along with it. And most of the language is learning it just by listening to how other people speak it and use the concepts. There's pretty much no set rules. When our teachers tell us that a certain concept is "always" how you do it, we have to ask if that's an English always or a Czech always. I'm pretty sure always doesn't exist in the Czech language haha.

That's literally all I got for this week. Literally the most uneventful week ever.

Spiritual thought for the week:

So one of the best parts of the week is choir. The choir director, Bro. Eggett, is hilarious, and he always says things that get me thinking and get me so pumped to go out in the field and start sharing the gospel. This week he talked about how we need to be so stoked and happy when sharing the gospel with others. We shouldn't be scared or iffy when telling others, because we have a message that will change their lives for eternity. He said that when we go out and share the gospel we're basically giving out free gold. You wouldn't walk up to someone and apologize for interrupting them and ask if maybe you can give them some free gold. You would be so pumped and stoked to share it with literally anyone you pass by. That's how we should feel about sharing the gospel. We're have free gold, and we should want to share it with anyone and everyone.

I can't wait to get to the field and start helping the people of the Czech Republic and Slovakia and start spreading this message with them. And even though it's gonna be rough for awhile with the language barrier, I'm so stoked to go all in and do everything I can to learn the language and culture.

Have the best week!

Sestra Lettuce