December 27, 2017

This has been an incredibly eventful week. The Christmas season has been a blast! I'm not exactly sure where to start but, Ill do my best to explain this past week. To start off with a little bit of interesting information. While I wait for my Visa, I will be serving in the Salt Lake City West mission. At least that is what the missionary portal is telling me, so I dont know for sure. I havent received an actual email about it, so I think I'm going to be talking to a travel agent today just to check. I really don't want to be going to salt lake. I am so anxious to be in Mexico already. I feel so late to the party and I just want to get serving in my area with my people. I know everything that happens however will be guided by the Lord, and I'll be where I need to be. Moving on from that, since my group is a 7 week group here at the mtc, and because of the Christmas season, for the past week we haven't had anyone to teach. Teachers, and TRC included. It has been real down. I miss teaching even if they were/are fake investigators. The spirit of teaching brings me so much joy. Instead of teaching investigators we have been doing a ton of contacting practice. Talking to people on the street is gonna be tough... I don't think I have that much confidence in my spanish. But that will come with time. So Christmas day was AWESOME. We started off with watching The Christmas Carol, which despite being an adult, puts me on edge. I don't get a kick out of the ghost stuff that used to terrify me as a child. Idk why I never outgrew that, but that movie scared the dickens out of me when I was little. But it was great. Later we had the opportunity to listen to Elder Neil L Andersen of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He had a really good Christmas message. But during the course of that devotional, everytime that I closed my eyes, I legit would nod off and then jerk awake. It was really awkward and embarrassing. But we were able to push through. I was so close to shaking his hand, like he was one person away from me and then turned the other way and left): but I've already shaken his hand so it was all good. Then to end the night, we had David Archuleta come, and perform a christmas set for us. And it was amazing. I forgot how dang good his voice is. then at the end, he let all the missionaries in the MTC come and shake his hand, which was a cool little experience. Overall it was a great christmas day. As far as spanish is going, Ive been doing my best to read the Book of Mormon in spanish only for at least 15 minutes a day, and while it goes super slow because I am hecka gringo, its been helping with my spanish tons. I'm able to speak much more fluently than I was able to before, and while I still have the vocab of a 2nd grader, I can speak like a 5th grader (: I glad for the weekly opportunity I have to share my testimony with a group of people however small that group is. Something that Elder Anderson shared is that as we do misisonary work, we testify of Christ. And Christ at the judgement day will say " He has testified of me, and now I will testify of him to the Father." I know that while missionary work can be hard, I can already tell that this will be the best two years of my life. And While my time to serve with everything is short, I will be a missionary for life. And I know that it will be well with me in the last days. I love this gospel and I want all thosearound me and around the world to have the opportunity to hear it. So this week I invite everyone in this email to think about how they have shared the Gospel in your life and how you can improve. For those who aren't LDS, I invite you to please find and hear the missionaries. The message they teach is one of joy. I know that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the happiest message one can every receive. It bring joy and peace in this life, and will bring even greater blessings in the life to come.  Im grateful for all of you. Keep going forth and being great people. Para Siempre Dios Este Con Vos. ​