LDS Missionary: France Paris Mission

Strange, Then Spiritual Tuesday

It hadn’t even been a week in the MTC and I felt like I knew everything that was going on each day. I felt like I had spent my entire life at the MTC and it was a normality. The only problem I still was having was getting up at 6:30 every day. I had not had to get up that early without getting a nap in the day somewhere for a really long time. When I was a senior in high school, I didn’t even have a first period class, so I didn’t have to be up until around 9:00 even during high school days.

Tuesday was the last day before I hit the week mark in the MTC, and I would only have 103 weeks left in my entire mission, not that I was counting.

Tuesday was already beginning to be one of my favorite days because we woke up and didn’t have to be in class by 7:00. We didn’t even have to be in our church clothes yet. We were starting the day by doing service, so we were in our pants and T-shirts. What a great thing it was to be in normal clothes. I didn’t think I would miss them that bad already, but it’s so much more comfortable to wear jeans rather than slacks.

“You’re all late,” the guy said as we walked into the gym building in our little group of eight elders. The guy must have just been a teacher here also because he looked like he was in his 20s. “What do you want to do, clean bathrooms or vacuum and dust all the stairs?”

“I don’t care,” I responded as he went through our group and got to me. I figured there are a lot of stairs and bathrooms in this building that they both will take forever.

“Well, since there are eight of you, split up in groups of four and go do those things,” the instructor said. “You will find cleaning supplies in the closet behind me.”

Somehow we decided that I would be with Elders Livingston, Barker, and Shumway. I’m not sure why we didn’t go two companionships together, but maybe Elder Pieper wanted to get away from me for awhile, so I didn’t care much.

We were chosen to do bathrooms, so the four of us made our way to the closest bathroom and started cleaning. It wasn’t too hard. Most of the bathrooms were fairly clean anyway, and Elder Livingston took it upon himself to clean all the toilets, so that made the rest of our lives a little easier.

“Does this technically qualify as service or is it just janitorial work?” Elder Livingston asked after we finished the first bathroom.

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said. “How often in the mission field will we have to clean out 10 bathrooms in one go?”

“Yeah, for real,” Elder Barker said. “This is the worst service ever. I would rather do something outdoors. That sounds more like service. Raking leaves or something.”

“No kidding. We are cooped up in buildings enough as it is, they should let us go clean up the temple grounds or something,” Elder Shumway commented.

“Oh man! This bathroom is so much worse!” Elder Livingston said as we walked into the women’s restroom and saw how dirty it was. “Gross! I thought that guys were supposed to be the disgusting ones.”

After what seemed like an eternity only shortened by having fun with three new friends, we made it to the final bathroom. By that point we were professional bathroom cleaners, so it didn’t take long to finish it off.

We made our way back to the janitorial closet and dropped off our supplies we took with us. The other four had finished before us and already headed back to the dorm building. We ran back that way because now was time to go to gym. We changed into basketball shorts and headed back to the same building for gym. Basketball shorts and a T-shirt was my normal, everyday wear back at home. It was the most comfortable thing to wear for me.

Gym was always my favorite part fo the day because I loved playing sports back at home. I would play sand volleyball every night I had the chance. My buddies at home and me would always play basketball or dunk ball on smaller hoops and ultimate Frisbee when we could get people to show up.