Practice Creates the Master

I think the gate has gotten taller since
this picture was taken. Prison, indeed.

Call me an eagle scout, but I like to be prepared. I was one of those kids (still am) that always had a backpack with them when everyone else had only their wallets. That being said, what better way to prepare for a mission than to volunteer at the MTC? I may or may not have had to do that for my mission prep class anyways, but here's how it went:
I talked to my madre en route to the building and hung up just as I reached the security guard. He said, "Yeah you better hang up!" Jokingly. It was funny. He let me inside the prison walls just as my friend Jake, who teaches French here, was exiting. So Jake escorted me to the holding area. There, I saw David from my ward and Hillary from work, so a girl joked about how popular I was here. We sang and prayed and they split us into two groups. I went upstairs to work with the Visitor's Center missionaries.

Kirtland Visitor's Center

Although we were originally told to be ourselves, the lady in charge of this group said it would be a good idea to have an inactive person in our group. I was grouped with Abby, from my mission prep class, and a girl who actually was inactive. Yet somehow, I was the only one willing to pretend to be inactive. I felt so awkward and embarrassed and guilty lying to them and not answering questions I normally would because of my role. So that's how the London and St. George visitor's centers went. I felt especially bad after the lesson was over and I told them I was serving a mission, because I am a really convincing inactive person and they probably thought I shouldn't be serving a mission.
But then the inactive girl agreed to pretend to be inactive. Not sure how that worked. But we went to the Kirtland MTC and I joked around with them a bit before they told us the story of John Tanner. Essentially, he was a wealthy and successful convert in the early days of the church. He had a dream that he needed to go to Kirtland on Christmas eve, so he got rid of his cornicopious possessions and loaded up his family and they left early Christmas day. He donated an exorbitant amount of money to the church over the years. When the church had some money of its own, Joseph Smith wrote him a check for its debt to Tanner. Tanner ripped up the check and said What debt? And Joseph Smith cried and blessed him that his family would never beg for bread again. And they are ridiculously wealthy to this day.