First day of S&I training

It is a very small world. Today at breakfast we sat down next to a small group of young missionaries headed for the Philippines, learning Tagalog here. I started chatting with a couple of them. The first was from Washington state, and the second said he was from California. I then said that we were from the San Diego area, and he said that he was actually from San Marcos, which is right next door to Carlsbad. Then I looked at his name tag, and it turns out he's the son of ScottM, a long-time colleague and friend from work. I had known that Scott's son was in the MTC, but it wasn't likely to run into him out of thousands of missionaries. Here's a photo we took and sent to Scott:

I slept pretty well last night -- the cough syrup and Afrin did their job. Today I'm feeling quite a bit better, but still not close to 100%, going through lotion kleenex regularly. Hopefully I'm on the mend.

Today we spent all day doing S&I training for YSAs. For those of you not up on all the acronyms, that's Seminary & Institute training for Young Single Adults, which is basically our assignment in Rome. There were 21 couples with us, including the Military Relations couples for much of the day. The S&I trainers talked a lot about how to plan and deliver lessons that work well for YSAs, with a bunch of interaction from the crowd. At the end of the day, a senior couple returned from a YSA mission in Germany talked with us for an hour about activities and how to involve the YSAs. We have another day and a half of S&I training.

After dinner, we watched a wonderful video of Elder Bednar speaking at the MTC on Christmas morning in 2011. The title of the talk is "The Character of Christ", and it was just over an hour long. He talked about how to turn outward as Christ did, toward helping others, instead of turning inward, which is how we all normally roll. It really gave us some good things to ponder and think about. There were some amazing stories, plus very animated and fun impersonations of Cookie Monster -- unusual for an apostle (to say the least)! Apparently the video is not available to the general public, being reserved for the MTC. So, if you want to watch this phenomenal video, you'll have to come on a mission!