Monday September 17, 2012
Hola todos!
I'm still here in the
Empty Sea!( get it…MTC) Lovin life! First of all I want to give a birthday
shoutout to the best little brother there is out there! Happy Birthday Marcus!
He turns 12 today and now that means he will eat cereal. I am certain of it.
Oh P.S. Mom the Dear
Elder deadline is like 5:00 PM on Fridays. I saw you mention that in your last
one. They don't come on Saturday which is a major bummer. Oh well. Thats ok.
The best day of the week is P-Day. You get to do laundry, take a nap if you want to, go to the temple, do whatever you want basically with some study time in between, which I think is my favorite part of every day. Study time is such a blessing to me. I love the scripture in Doctina y Convenios where the Lord gives revelation to Hyrum Smith and says that "Before you seek to proclaim My word, first seek to obtain My word." That is what I view study time as. Obtaining the Lord's word so that I can deliver his message with accuracy, conviction, and most importantly, with the Holy Ghost. But yeah. P-Day is awesome, but Sunday is a way nice time too. I love the Firesides on Sundays. I feel so edified, and I love using the word edified too. We also get to go on a temple walk, but I don't dare disclose the precise hour of that great time because I know my mother would be there every week. I do it because I love you mom. It's in the late afternoon though. If you can find me I will run away. Love ya too much.
My Spanish is coming along little by little. I get better at it each day, and by learning more grammatical tenses and vocabulary, soon enough I will become THE Spanish Master. Soon enough will probably come in like 9ish months though haha. ( In Due time of the Lord. But I really do feel the help of the Lord and all prayers coming my way. Thank you so much for them and don't you dare stop!!!! I need all the help I can get. I am at the point where I can't always say exactly what I want to say, but through much brain power and maybe a 5 to 10ish second thought process figure out a way to say what I want to say. It probably isn't grammatically correct, but most Spanish speakers can figure out most of what I am saying haha.
Anyways, a fun thing happened! I committed my fake real investigator to baptism! His real name is Hermano King and he is my teacher, but he role plays a progressing investigator named Manuel. I will give you the rundown of our most recent lesson with him. He has been pretty receptive, probably due to the fact that he is our first investigator, but that is ok. We started out teaching horribly, mostly because one, it was all in Spanish, and I didn't speak much Spanish the second day in the MTC, second, because they throw you in before you have any remote idea how to teach!!!! That was the worst part. We went in there completely blind, attempted to blabber out a couple of Spanish and Spanglish words, and then tried to decipher what he was saying to us, which was probably like 25%. They recently taught us a very important phrase that we will be using forever. “Repetalo por favor?” “Repeat that please?” haha I have used that countless times in our recent lessons. Sorry for that tangent. Anyways, we have taught him most everything, except for a couple commandments. We know that he can feel the Spirit in our lessons, before we just haven't been very good at identifying it. So I came up with a masterful plan to “help” him out. We started out our lesson by having him sing with us Soy un Hijo de Dios, I am a Child of God. It is an awesome song because a 6 year old can understand it and it is impossible not to feel the Spirit during it. I then asked him immediately, Manuel, what do you feel right now? He said "tranquilo," which I think means tranquil or something like that, haven't looked up the translation yet. I then identified that as the Spirit. I read him Jacob 4:13 out of the Book of Mormon, which testifies that the Spirit testifies of truth and cannot lie. I asked him if he had been praying about whether baptism is the right thing for him. We challenged him before, and he said that if he was ready, he would be baptized. I then asked him if he would pray aloud right now, and ask if baptism was the right thing for him right now. He did, and gave an awesome, simple prayer. I asked him what he felt afterwards. He said that he was feeling the Spirit. We again pointed out that the Spirit cannot lie, so I asked him what he needed to do. He then said the magic words, "I need to follow my answer." He said all this in Spanish of course. I was so happy at that point. I then extended the baptismal invitation, which, "Manuel, will you follow the example of Jesus Christ and be baptized by someone holding the Priesthood authority of God?" He accepted, and has a date, but we are pushing it back a little bit because we still have a little bit to teach him. The beautiful thing about it is that whatever we teach him now, hopefully he will go off his testimony of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and realize that it is all true. I love it! When I was testifying of Baptism to Manuel, even though I was doing it in Spanish, I could feel the Spirit so strongly, just another confirmation to me that this work is true and that I am being an instrument in the Lord's hands to bring about His mighty purposes.
The best day of the week is P-Day. You get to do laundry, take a nap if you want to, go to the temple, do whatever you want basically with some study time in between, which I think is my favorite part of every day. Study time is such a blessing to me. I love the scripture in Doctina y Convenios where the Lord gives revelation to Hyrum Smith and says that "Before you seek to proclaim My word, first seek to obtain My word." That is what I view study time as. Obtaining the Lord's word so that I can deliver his message with accuracy, conviction, and most importantly, with the Holy Ghost. But yeah. P-Day is awesome, but Sunday is a way nice time too. I love the Firesides on Sundays. I feel so edified, and I love using the word edified too. We also get to go on a temple walk, but I don't dare disclose the precise hour of that great time because I know my mother would be there every week. I do it because I love you mom. It's in the late afternoon though. If you can find me I will run away. Love ya too much.
My Spanish is coming along little by little. I get better at it each day, and by learning more grammatical tenses and vocabulary, soon enough I will become THE Spanish Master. Soon enough will probably come in like 9ish months though haha. ( In Due time of the Lord. But I really do feel the help of the Lord and all prayers coming my way. Thank you so much for them and don't you dare stop!!!! I need all the help I can get. I am at the point where I can't always say exactly what I want to say, but through much brain power and maybe a 5 to 10ish second thought process figure out a way to say what I want to say. It probably isn't grammatically correct, but most Spanish speakers can figure out most of what I am saying haha.
Anyways, a fun thing happened! I committed my fake real investigator to baptism! His real name is Hermano King and he is my teacher, but he role plays a progressing investigator named Manuel. I will give you the rundown of our most recent lesson with him. He has been pretty receptive, probably due to the fact that he is our first investigator, but that is ok. We started out teaching horribly, mostly because one, it was all in Spanish, and I didn't speak much Spanish the second day in the MTC, second, because they throw you in before you have any remote idea how to teach!!!! That was the worst part. We went in there completely blind, attempted to blabber out a couple of Spanish and Spanglish words, and then tried to decipher what he was saying to us, which was probably like 25%. They recently taught us a very important phrase that we will be using forever. “Repetalo por favor?” “Repeat that please?” haha I have used that countless times in our recent lessons. Sorry for that tangent. Anyways, we have taught him most everything, except for a couple commandments. We know that he can feel the Spirit in our lessons, before we just haven't been very good at identifying it. So I came up with a masterful plan to “help” him out. We started out our lesson by having him sing with us Soy un Hijo de Dios, I am a Child of God. It is an awesome song because a 6 year old can understand it and it is impossible not to feel the Spirit during it. I then asked him immediately, Manuel, what do you feel right now? He said "tranquilo," which I think means tranquil or something like that, haven't looked up the translation yet. I then identified that as the Spirit. I read him Jacob 4:13 out of the Book of Mormon, which testifies that the Spirit testifies of truth and cannot lie. I asked him if he had been praying about whether baptism is the right thing for him. We challenged him before, and he said that if he was ready, he would be baptized. I then asked him if he would pray aloud right now, and ask if baptism was the right thing for him right now. He did, and gave an awesome, simple prayer. I asked him what he felt afterwards. He said that he was feeling the Spirit. We again pointed out that the Spirit cannot lie, so I asked him what he needed to do. He then said the magic words, "I need to follow my answer." He said all this in Spanish of course. I was so happy at that point. I then extended the baptismal invitation, which, "Manuel, will you follow the example of Jesus Christ and be baptized by someone holding the Priesthood authority of God?" He accepted, and has a date, but we are pushing it back a little bit because we still have a little bit to teach him. The beautiful thing about it is that whatever we teach him now, hopefully he will go off his testimony of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and realize that it is all true. I love it! When I was testifying of Baptism to Manuel, even though I was doing it in Spanish, I could feel the Spirit so strongly, just another confirmation to me that this work is true and that I am being an instrument in the Lord's hands to bring about His mighty purposes.
I love this work and
know that it is the work of the Living God, and His Son, Jesus Christ. It is
true. I have no shadow of a doubt that I will be bringing people to the
RESTORED CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST!!!! It isn't the church of Joseph Smith. It
isn't the church of Thomas S. Monson. It is the Church of Jesus Christ, and He
is at the head of it. I love you all. See you in about 23ish months.
Love,
Elder Mike
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