May 31, 2010

~ So Elder Slack is here now, and we´re having a blast. He´s really humble, and awesome. He´s actually from Reno, so everyone askes us what the casinos are like. He´s still learning spanish, but he has seriously progressed so much in just 4 days. We had 23 lessons this last week, and the zone leaders said that we broke the sister's record of most lessons in our zone, so that was cool. We had 4 lessons to investigators with a member present, 8 with just investigators and 11 with members and menos activos. It is almost easier being the trainer, because I just decide which way and we go, there´s not so much indecision. But yeah, everything is going good, he likes playing soccer, so we´ll have more fun with the kids here. I forgot to tell you something funny that happened, so I was using rubbing alcohol to clean my face every night, but then they stopped selling it so I bought hydrogen peroxide, and I used it to wash my face for like a month and it turned my eyebrows yellow, so yeah I have yellow eyebrows, but at least I realized so I don´t use hydrogen peroxide anymore for my face. Thanks for everything, and I hope you have a great summer!

May 24, 2010

~ The weeks are going by like days it seems like. For the past weeks they have been making a new sacrament room in the church, and this was the first time we got to use it. In my first area and here also sacrament isn´t as reverant, and some of the members get kinda mad at the others, but there´s a lot of kids, and they ususally don´t take them out. But now they have put a speaker out in the hall so the parents can take their kids out and still listen, so maybe that will help. It´s also hard cause the microphone isn´t as loud, so whenever I talk I try and speak right into it to make it louder. Everythings good, it´s just hard here because there´s so many people from different backgrounds who weren´t raised in the church, and I guess people get offended easily. I haven´t heard or seen anything specific but there are a ton of inactive members. We have activated one lady though who hadn´t been to church for five years, so that´s good I guess. She taught us how to make croquetas, and they´re really good. We also learned how to make mojo (the j makes and h sound in spanish) and alioli. Mojo is a popular sauce from the canary islands and alioli is like homeade garlic mayonaise, and they're both really good.
It´s been good with Elder Wardell, we have learned a lot, and it seems like we´ve both grown stronger as missionaries. Last night a guy told us we were angels and that we couldn´t know how much he needed the messange that we gave him. It was cool because earlier elder wardell was talking to his wife and playing their guitar, and I was talking to him, and he told me how his work is really stressfull because it´s so competetive, and his boss told him that for the same salary he could be replaced by an engineer with a high degree and everything, so his work has been tough. He told that to me, but Elder Wardell didn´t even hear him say that, and then when we were going to share a scripture, Elder Wardell decided to open up to Ether 12 and read where it says that our testimonies are made sure only after the testing of our faith. We didn´t decide on reading that before hand or anything. It was good to see him receive strength from the Lord in that moment.
So we got the tansfer calls saturday night, and my comp is going up to Granada and there´s a new american elder (Elder Slack) coming down from the Madrid MTC this Wednesday. President called me Saturday and told me I would be training, and he sounded pretty confident that I could do it, so I´m just going to trust his judgement and do my best. so I´ll let you know how it goes, it´s going to be an adventure that´s for sure, thanks for everything!

May 17

~ This week was good, we had 17 lessons, so we almost made the 20 lesson goal. We learned in zone conference about what president calls leccion 0, and its the very first thing we teach to people in the first appointment. We basically find out what they want in life, then we give them an overview of the gospel and explain to them our job as missionaries. We then explain baptism, and commit them to read and pray about the things that we are goiing to be teaching them. We taught this lesson twice this week, and when we taught it last night it worked really good. So we give them a direction and show them from the beginning the desired goal which is baptism, and that helps both us and them. We taught him how to pray, and at first he said he didn´t want to in front of us but president said we should be persistent and should wait until they pray. That´s what we did, and he prayed and it was awesome. So yeah everything is going good, I think that my comp will be leaving next week but we won´t know till this Saturday. Everything is going good over here, thanks for everything and tell everyone I miss them!

May 3, 2010

~ My birthday was really good, the night before we ate super good seafood pizza at an investigator´s house, and they are super nice, and on Saturday we played fútbol with the young men, and they had threatened to throw eggs and flour on me because it was my birthday for the entire week before, but they forgot, so I was safe. After fútbol we ate at a members house who takes care of an older man who is hilarious. He´s like 85, and he can´t hear very good, but he´s always making jokes and laughing, I was saying the prayer for the food, and he started laughing and I started laughing and it took me a while to stop. He´s got a good attitude. after that we visted a less active member who´s living in a motor home now in a city at the north end of the island, and we shared a good message with him and left him a chapter in the Book of Mormon to read, he has changed a lot since I´ve been here. The testimony meeting we had the day after was amazing, it was Mother´s day here, and it was powerful. The testimonies of the humble people here are awesome.
That makes me super happy that Jeff really likes the dental field, I still really feel like that is what I want to do, I want to give people good smiles. I´m going to have to work hard in school when I get back but it´ll be worth it. So we are flying to the island of Tenerife this Friday and we´ll fly back Saturday night. I´m excited to visit that island, and see my comp from Madrid Elder Anderson. We are going to have a big fútbol game between the las palmas zone and the tenerife zone, and it´s gunna be epic. So yeah everything is going great, the mission is the best, thanks for letting me experience this, you have always been great examples. It´s a miracle that I´m out here.
elder ross