Banana Stick Cup (Add videos)

"Can I take a picture with you??" "I'm a huge fan!" "Aren't you the guy that created banana stick cup?"

These are questions that I get asked on the daily. Is it hard to deal with the fame? I guess it gets annoying at times. But when you create the fastest growing game in the MTC, what can you do? 

It all started at lunch on Wednesday, when about a third of the banana I was eating fell onto the floor. Someone picked it up and put it back onto my plate, and I wasn't going to eat it, so I started poking holes in it with a chopstick. Then the gears started turning in my mind. The vision flooded into my head all at once. And then, banana stick cup was born.

What is banana stick cup? It's a fantastic game that consists of a banana, a stick, and a cup (naming games has never been my strong suit). The game starts with one person against another. You take turns poking a chopstick through a third of a banana, and then balancing the chopstick on a cup with the banana in the middle. The cup is half full of a drink of the previous banana stick cup winner's choice. It could be milk, apple juice, root beer, etc. The goal is to not break the banana in two, or have it fall into the drink when it's your turn to balance it. If one of those two things happens, the loser (the one who was trying to balance the banana when it broke) has to drink the whole cup with the banana in it.

As the holes are poked in the banana throughout the game, the banana gets weaker, making it more likely to break. When the banana breaks, everyone shouts in unison "banana, stick, cup!" And then the loser has to drink whatever's in the cup. So that's the whole game! As I mentioned earlier, banana stick cup has really taken off in the MTC (within my district). We've been playing it every day at lunch and have now created a tournament bracket which will determine the best banana stick cup player in the district. I'll try to include a few pics and vids in my google photos in case you need a visual.

Last Tuesday we had our general authority devotional, which was led by Elder Takashi Wada of the Seventy. He gave many personal experiences of how he came to be converted to the church. It was really powerful because the missionary who started his conversion process was a brand new missionary who was not great at the language and spoke in broken Japanese. Elder Wada then said that when this missionary began to talk about the restoration of the Gospel, his mouth was filled and his words flowed perfectly. I have a testimony that the gift of tongues is real, and I have seen it in my own experiences already. When I talk about everyday things in Korean it can be very difficult to memorize words and sentences. However, when I try to memorize phrases that pertain to the Gospel, I seem to be able to learn much quicker!

Sorry I don't have very interesting stories in my emails yet, we do the same things at the MTC every week so not much is new.

I would like to share my testimony on the spirit of the temple! Sometimes the temple can feel repetitive, but I know that if you go with an open heart and mind, you will learn something new every time! And you will also be more likely to have the spirit with you throughout your week.

Elder Jensen