Thinking this morning of how great it is taking my daily walk, I remembered how incarcerated I felt in the MTC. Each day felt like a year and I felt like climbing the walls that I spent so much time within. Not only were we indoors practically every moment of the day, we were mostly in tiny little rooms that were filled to the max with people.

My fondest experience, post MTC, was the first day I jumped on my bike in France and coasted downhill into Cannes towards the sea. Clean air, birds singing, trees, and spacial freedom lay ahead. The rest of my mission was not too bad simply because I could finally make some decisions for myself. I was TBM and stayed that way for almost another decade but I cannot stand closed-in places with too many people. I was, by TSCC standards, a terrible missionary mostly because I never fit the mold but I never believed that just being myself could be a bad thing because I was a good person, just not conformist. Needless to say TSCC never cared much for me. So, guess they should be glad I left. Right?

Cannes was my first city in the mission field. No way.

First thought that came to mind about MTC: leaving the MTC while it was still dark, in PJs with my companion and blankets and pillows to watch the sunrise from the hill below the Provo Temple.

First thought about Cannes: "sharing" the BoM with people down by the sea and a French guy sits me down and gently tells me so many things that are not right about the BoM and to really think about what I'm doing. Stopped me dead in my tracks because he wasn't a preacher or anything, just a guy who knew I was on the wrong path who felt it important to talk with me.

I thought I was Mr. Bigshot because I went on a mission a year late, after some "real world" experience (some military training and several years of inactivity).

I thought I had some talent in resolving tough concerns (to me, a "tough" concern was polygamy).

So one day we're role playing and I'm an investigator with a concern. Some sister is presenting a discussion to me and I'm supposed to pop a concern into it...but the game was that I was supposed to let her "resolve" my concern.
I didn't even intend it to be a tough concern, and I wasn't even trying to be a jerk...I was going to let her "resolve" my concern on her first try...but she didn't even try. She jumped straight to "I know the BoM is true and that JS was a true prophet". So, not even meaning to be beligerant, but also recognizing that she did not answer my question, I asked again.
She broke down.
The instructor called me off like a bad dog.
Polygamy wasn't fair play. My concern was SUPPOSED to be something trite and petty like...I can't come to church because I don't have a car.

We were never taught how to handle tough concerns about church doctrine and history. I just learned it OJT.
Actually, were never taught tough church doctrine and history.
There was this mysterious dark lurking phenomenon called "anti", that was like a spell. It was like the Siren Song...once you heard it, you were spellbound. You had to just not ever hear it. But you'd see it take down investigators...you'd be progressing though the discussions, then you return one day and they won't let you in. Sometimes they just said they'd talked to someone, a minister, a friend, a family member, you know, people you just can't trust as much as us, who told them something...and now they're not interested.
Occassionaly they'd give you some info, a tract, an audio tape, a video tape, a book. But we never "got it". I'd read the stuff and think, so what?
Thus I went my whole mission thinking that all "concerns" were trite and petty, and false, and that it was more of a spell than reasoning. These weak-minded fools were falling for Sith mind tricks.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/01/2013 06:17PM by amos2.

Being video taped practicing the discussions with volunteers. Then watching them back again. I really hated that. I gained about 10 pounds in the mtc from all of the desserts and my clothes were fitting tight in the chest area. During a practice discussion with the elders the saftly pin that was holding my blouse closed popped open and my cleavage came literally bursting out. The elders were SO embarassed and the next day I was called out of class in trouble. apparently my inappropriate tight clothes choices were making some people uncomfortable. The males apparently thought that I was trying to distract or seduce them.

Numerous boring meetings, and the one time I met a GA feeling embarrassed that I did not know who he was. Now I have been out long enough to know the reason I did not know who he was, was because he wasn't a very important person.

My brother came to visit me. He was attending BYU at the time and I had sent him a letter telling him what time we had "PE" or whatever it was called. We had a free hour two or three times a week (I can't remember exactly) and my companion liked to run laps around the field that was accross the street from MTC and in front of the temple. I don't know if they still allow missionaries to run there but at the time we were allowed to do so. So anyway, I had asked my brother to bring me a can of Dr. Pepper (of course this was contraband in the MTC). So he did come to see me one day. I hugged him and was talking to him when one of the MTC instructors saw and scolded me for talking to him. He made me go back inside and my brother was left standing on the sidewalk holding the Dr. Pepper and feeling bad that he'd gotten me in trouble. I felt awful. I was lectured about how important it was to keep ALL the rules (one of which was no outside visitors, family included). I think I cried about it and felt so guilty, you'd think I had done something truly sinful. I really beat myself up for that for several days and vowed to be more obedient. Looking back it's ridiculous that they made me feel so bad about a simple and innocent visit with my brother. They acted like I'd broken a serious commandment. I was just homesick and wanted to see my brother (and drink some Dr. Pepper, lol). It really shows just how cultish the church is, especially the MTC.

Being uncomfortable ALL the time. I wasn't used to short hair, dorky clothes, no rock n roll, one piece garments that pulled at my crotch, no contact with girls, not being able to read normal literature, not ever being alone, etc. After 2 months of the brainwash I began to feel somewhat comfortable.

I am an introvert and need my alone time. Being in a room with 3 other guys, having a comp who was pretty unhappy to be there, and having to be up by 5:30 am every day was awful.

I'd already taken 5 years of French, so the language was easy for me. I spent a lot of time tutoring others. It was all review for me. Just being confined to a small classroom with 9 other people all day, with no down time for myself was tough.

Thinking I had just ruined my life

One of my strongest memories from the MTC is of listening to a member of the MTC president talk about the importance of obedience. He shared a story about a returned missionary who was applying for a job, but someone at the place he was trying to work at knew someone who served in his mission and that person let him know that this RM had been a "disobedient" missionary. Naturally, he didn't get the job.

Looking back, it makes me mad that a leader would explicitly scare new mishies with the prospect of being snubbed by the mormon good ol' boys network as a punishment for not being a good missionary.

Missionaries are jerks to each other. Sabotaging someone's career because of his mission sounds exactly how missionaries treat each other.

By the end of my mission, the biggest problems for me were not members, investigators, or uninterested French people. It was how awful the mission and the others missionaries treated you.

I was in some testimony meeting with many different districts and an elder got up and started bearing his testimony about how he struggled in the MTC to be sure he was doing the right thing and to be sure he was supposed to stay on his mission. One night while he thought everyone was asleep, he got down on his knees and prayed and prayed to know if he was supposed to stay on a mission. He said he actually heard a voice tell him he was doing the right thing and needed to stay in the mission field.

As he told this, a couple of elders in the row in front of us started laughing. My companion and I were mad that they were laughing at this poor guy who was pouring his heart out at the pulpit. So we told them to shut up and they did but afterward, being kinda know-it-all sisters, we told them what we thought of their irreverence and they told us that they were that elder's roommates. They'd gone to the bathroom without him realizing it, and upon returning, heard the guy down on his knees praying through the door which they had left slightly ajar. So they took it upon themselves to whisper the answer to this guy's prayer and get him to stay in the MTC. This elder was testifying he'd heard God speak when in reality, it was his roommates' whisper that he'd heard. That's what was so funny to them.

I have a couple of good and a couple of bad memories of the MTC but most of it's a blur. I don't know why this one memory always comes to mind first but it's always really bothered me.

That's the best faith promoting story I've ever heard!

My personal favorite was the story they told us about the entire MTC district that snuck out to go mountain climbing, on one of the nearby ridges. The story then went on that they all died in a fall, and it was because of their disobedience.

Looking back, the story sounds like so much BS. However, even if it were true, it wasn't disobedience but gravity that killed them.

The story was told in the same vein, obey unconditionally, all the time, or bad stuff will happen to you.

I was a teacher in the MTC I taught in the mornings and I was totally trying to be a good teacher. It was the only job on campus where I was treated like $hit. I tried to make the Elders time there go quickly and have fun. I would break the rules and bring food. I guess I was part of the problem but I really felt they were being abused looking back now. One of the Elders in my group was very withdrawn and seemed depressed. I finally got him to talk and he was berated becasue he confessed to daily masturbation. He thought life was over because he couldn't stop completely. I told him that it was the victorian interpretation and that men were hardwired that way and that he was normal because over 90% of the missionaries out masturbate. The longer you are out the higher the percentage gets.
I also found out that there were camera's everywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if they were in the bathroom. I was told they had observed two of my elders were involved sexually and they wanted me to keep an eye on them, and get them to talk and see if there were any others they were hanging around with. I was supposed to be their inside informant. After that group was done I quit, that was the begenning of my exit. I started to realize there was more important things to be involved with that didn't include spying.

never mind wrong topic



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/01/2013 06:48PM by buddyjoe.

My first and only nocturnal emission, or "blessing" as we called them, occurred at the MTC. It was the first time in my adolescent life that I had been able to go 6 weeks without fiddling with my factory's release valve, and once it happened I was off the self-celibacy wagon.

I got reprimanded for speaking to an elderly woman too long while working in the call center. She called for a Bible, but she had just spent her first Christmas alone after her husband passed away, and I just let her talk. This infuriated the suits, because I wasn't going to meet quota.

I also remember the elders bound for Portugal going a little odd after being sequestered for so many weeks and shaving their legs together. One shaved "I [heart] You" on his leg and left it that way.

Ninety percent of all MTC "training" now consists of working in a call center, both cold calling people, and returning calls for people who in a moment of weakness, are stupid enough to call in response to a cult recruitment add.

It was like living in a church. It was church 24/7. Wearing a suit almost every waking moment. Praying, praying, and more praying. Testimonkey baring. Everyone talking for the lard saying 'the lard wants this, and the lard likes that.'

I was so glad to get out of there!

Well, a little back story... right before my mission I was "teaching" my sister to drive. We happened to be in a parking lot that that had a very high curb and my sister ran straight into it. No problem except that she didn't even have a learners permit. Stupid yes. Anyway, it jacked up my car pretty good. Admission fluid and stuff was leaking and it was un-drivable. I lied and told the insurance company I was driving so it would be covered and I wouldn't be stuck having to fix it with all the money I had earned for my mission.

Fast forward a few month and I'm now in the mtc. We are having some serious and intense classroom lectures on how the spirit can't be with you if you don't come clean about EVERYTHING and how you won't succeed as a missionary if you haven't repented of all of your transgressions etc.

I really felt bad about lying. Everything else had already been "cleared up" and to me it was a pretty significant lie.

So, we were encourage to talk to one of the big wigs if we had anything we needed to clear up before we went to the field.

So, I'm sitting in a room like a bishops office or stake pres and this old guy is telling me to come clean about whatever it is that I'm there for. He's there to help. I'm embarrassed and ashamed and just want to be humiliated and forgiven so I can feel the spirit and be worth something to myself and to the church. I slowly got my story out and this guy just stared at me. Seriously. He was like, AND??? I told him that was it. HE said do you have any morality problem you would like to discuss and I said no. He seriously blew me off. I don't remember how it even ended because the look of confusion on his face basically said, why are you even bothering me with something so trivial.. In my mind I can almost see him laughing at me..

I NEVER confessed another incident of any kind to a bishop again after that. Or my mission pres. for that matter.

I had just broken the law and he wanted to hear about something sexual that I was involved in.

Oh, and the food was pretty bad. I think I gained 10 pounds in the mtc.

highlights of the mtc:

sleeping (or rather, not being able to fall asleep) in a room with 5 other snoring dudes and then being guilted into waking up with them an hour early every morning so we could all be extra obedient together

teaching everyone how to break into the rooms with a vacuum cleaner, note card, and dental floss so that we could get our stash of candy we left in one of the rooms that was locked when the missionaries left for their mission country's mtc.

falling asleep in our weekly temple sessions.

chicken cordon bleu

crying for not making the general conference choir because i didnt embellish my formal choir experience like most everyone else.

being the only one in my district to get a visa so i stayed an extra week with no assigned companion. just a district that i had to pretend to be around. best week at the mtc. plus somehow everyone in that district was cool with listening to sigur ros in the room.

The awful CALL CENTER! Being a telemarketer. Sitting, scared to death, waiting for the beep that meant I was connected to somebody, then frantically mis-pronouncing their name. I HATED the call center.

My companion would mysteriously get mega nature calls during that time that required 45 minutes on the toilet. He was smarter than I.

It got to the point that I would skip breakfast to get more sleep.

It was in the old red brick building just north of the Church Office Building (no longer standing).

It was crowded. We were no longer individuals. Just "Elder." We all looked the same and acted the same.

We were told to send goodbye-ish letters and bear our testimonies to old friends so as not to have the past interfere with having "our eyes single to the glory of God." Dump the girlfriend (since some other return missionary was going to get her anyway.

And lie. Only write good things home, nothing sad or discouraging. Don't be discouraged or listen to "enemies of the church who have been taken over by Satan."

"Are you sure you have no unconfessed sins that need to be taken care of?" (ohmygod... the line of newbie missionaries wanting to repent wrapped around the halls.)

So.... removing individuality, listening to propaganda, and learning sales techniques. There was some attention given to overcoming objections, but as others have mentioned, the "real" objections weren't discussed.

And I remember walking over en masse to the lower-floor COB cafeteria for meals. While some felt the Christian-soldier-army camaraderie, I felt like an automaton.

THE TREE OF LIFE
because i was black and all the white guys
would try to catch glance of whether it was true that we black folks had a bigger one or not.
They weren't disapointed but i was shy about things like this back then because it seemed contradictory to the church's teachings
When asked i told my branch president it was kind of gross, and he told me that everything in the MTC was planned by the servants of God and therefore it was GOd's plan

God's plan to have white guys check out your junk?

Interesting God.

Hmmm.

Things were relaxed in my MTC district because I was in the Spanish native speaker group and nobody needed to take the language lessons seriously. So... strongest memories:

1) having a former classmate from BYU as my teacher and getting a chance to see just how flaming he was (not a bad thing, but he was really a little too grabby)

2) learning to write braille from another teacher who was blind

3) consoling a companion who broke down sobbing over the usual--guilt over having masturbated after he went to the temple and got his garmies. Which I thought looked hot on him. I was happy to give him a shoulder to cry on

I few memories of the MTC and I was there for 2 months learning Korean.

The funnier one is that we had guy from California, we started in Late September and were going to be headed out just before Thanksgiving. He had never seen snow. Early October, long before it was even chilly, every now and then, someone would point out the window and shout "It's snowing!" and he would jerk his head around and look to see... he was very excited.

The other memory is the one time I was alone in the MTC. My companion was sick (and was a complete jerk, had a serious god complex, "I'm going to save everyone!"). Anyway, I was stuck back at the dorms while he slept away his "fever"... I was horribly depressed. One teacher had been nice to me and tried to get me assigned to another companion, but it turned out he was kicked out of the MTC since it was discovered that he was cheating on his wife, but that's another story...

Anyway, I was stuck at the dorms while my "companion" was sleeping while everyone else was at one of the many meetings that were MTC wide, I don't remember which. I had to get away, even if it was just for a minute, I went outside the building, just outside. It was snowing, it was beautiful. That was the most spiritual I felt the entire time I was at the MTC. I was breaking the rules, but I was alone in the snow, and I was at peace.

What does it say that my only real clear memory of the MTC was needing time alone?

I went to an asian MTC, and my most memorable memory was when a retired Medical American couple used a water gun on my left ear to remove some wax. It hit the nerve, and hurt really bad. Fortunately, I didn't lose any hearing.

Hated my companion, as usual. He was a class clown, and lied to me about feeling the Spirit when I practiced a lesson on him.

It was nice to get to know the sister missionaries. Never been in a 50/50 gendered class before.

I remember somehow sharing a maybe 100 sq ft room with 5 other guys, wrestling with a guy that figured he was pretty good and beating him, people craving mountain dew (they don't put caffeine in it up here in canada eh?), being bored out of my mind most of the time (8 weeks), hearing silly stories like how the CIA tried to copy the mtc's language training program and failed miserably bc they didn't have the gift of tongues (haha neither did half the mishies I knew), eating way too much shitty cafeteria food and pooping a lot, and my #1 fav was when the chorister had a fit bc everybody stood up during the spirit of god and he didn't tell us to so they told us not to obey those kinds of promptings from the spirit.

Sigh...what a waste of time...

Our teacher, Hermana Gallardo (Galleta Gallardo). She didn't appreciate the humor in our nick name for her like we did. Does anybody on here remember Galleta Gallardo back in late 1978?

Was called the LTM back then.

Provo, UT summer heat.

Knight Mangum Hall, dorm rooms built for 2 occupied by 6 elders, no air conditioning.

Showers built for, well a dorm floor with rooms only built to be occupied by 2 now occupied by 6.

Hoping I could maintain in a crowded shower with a whole new crew of guys, er a, elders, having gotten used to the old crew of guys after 6 years of after gym showers with them in jr. high, high school (it was a small town, new people were rare). I had no idea why maintaing might be a problem but then I'm slow and didn't know much.

Wake up time: 6:00 am.

Start time for the roofing crew, 5:50 am.

I hate the smell of hot tar in the morning. The roofers' 5:50 am noise pretty much sucked too.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/02/2013 08:28PM by lulu.