November 17, 2010

~ this week was awesome, we found a cuban guy who I stopped in the street and he is super humble and he came to church, and now we´re teaching him, and he accepted a baptismal date. He smokes and drinks but he´s really spiritual, before we taught him the restoration, we left him with a pamphlet about the restoration and he read it and then when we taught him the restoration he explained to us the first vision and why Joseph Smith was necessary and why the Book of Mormon came forth. It was so cool to see someone realize the magnitude of the restoration. This sunday I had to give a talk in sacrament, and the microphone went out at the very beginning of sacrament meeting, so I had to yell my talk, but I made them laugh, and everyone said that they understood me well. I´ve learning that you gotta speak loud when you give talks or the people won´t pay atention. Everytime I´ve givin a talk here in Spain I´ve spoke right into the microphone because the niños are always pretty loud. The old talks of the General Authorities that I have from the 1950´s are awesome cause they are so good at speaking. They vary their ton of voice a lot, and they´re good at keeping your attention. It had to be hard to speak in the times of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, I´ve heard stories that sometimes they had to take breaks for their voices, and I believe it, it´s fisically draining to speak loudly for a long time. I´ve definitely learned a lot about public speaking in the mission. So today the whole zone is here with us. we are all writing our families, and then we´re going to play futbol as a zone and then we are going to see the island a little. Tonight we have a meeting with the branch and then after we´re going to have a meeting with the Seventy, and the District Presidency, and we´re going to go over how the meetings with the ward should be, and he´s going to teach us. Then tomorrow we´re going to have zone conference. Conducting will be alright, the worst part about it is I have to do it in English and i feel awkard when i speak english. i can speak publicly in spanish anytime anywhere, but in english it´s hard. the spaniards are so good at talking, everytime you talk to them they put on a show and it´s awesome, i´m trying to learn to speak like they do. the package has gotten here but i haven´t had time to pick it up yet, but thanks! we set the goal of 8 baptisms for this transfer for the zone and we´ve had 7 so far, and then the A.P.´s extended another challenge which is 50 baptisms by the end of the year for the canary islands, and right now we have 45 for the year, so the islands have had a mountain of success this year. i´m excited to see president and to listen to elder Caussé. my talk this week was on our well being fisical and spiritual, and i concluded that a good wellbeing spiritual can get us through any fisical challenge that we may have. one of the talks that i´ve been listening to over and over is a talk by hugh nibley speaking about brigham young, and he basically just reads quotes from brigham young, and it´s super powerfull what he says, he talks about how as saints we can have a spiritual joy that gets us through anything if we will stop worring about the things of the world, and simply obey and give thanks to God. I know that it doesn´t matter what happens in this world as long as we consecrate our lives to the Lord. Thanks for everything, have a great thanksgiving!
elder ross