Three Weeks Left October 1, 2012

Finally ran into Elder Buchanan.

Elders Dial, Johnson, Anderson

 

A few Oly additions.

Monday October 1, 2012
Well familia,

It seems that my last email didn't send for one reason or another. It may have had too many attachments or something but thats ok. That letter from last week is copied and pasted below. Looks like you get a double dose of letters this week. Be Grateful!

I officially have 21 days left in the MTC!!! In 3 weeks I will be off into the field! I could not be more excited. I absolutely love it here, the Spirit that is here, the devotionals, study time, and everything!!! Something about being a set-apart missionary makes me want to study so much! Before my mission I could hardly read my scriptures, Preach My Gospel, or anything for more than like ten minutes. But now, I am sad when my hour long Personal Study is over! It flies by so quickly! When I am not studying doctrine for and preparing lessons for my investigators, I am either reading the Book of Mormon, or the New Testament. I absolutely love both books. In the NT I am in Romans. I love the way Paul writes and preaches. I want to be a missionary like Paul! If I can be a tenth of what Paul was I will be crazy successful. In the Book of Mormon, I just passed the story of Abinadi, which is one of the coolest stories in scripture! Abinadi is such a BOSS!!! Both were fantastic missionaries and hopefully I can develop similar qualities to both of them!

Well we have had some sweet lessons over this past week! One of our "fake real" investigators is getting baptized this week! He was a really hard investigator at first, but then after one awesome lesson about why commitments are so important, he as accepted pretty much everything. He turned into a golden investigator with time. That was Manuel. We also teach Luis, who is also one of my teachers, but then we teach a woman named Ivelisse (tough name, took me a whole week to memorize it. EE-VAY-LEE-SAY). She is a volunteer that lives in the area and we teach her twice a week. I didn't know if she was a member at first, but then she wore a BYU shirt to one of the lessons and was quoting verbatim from Isaiah so she gave herself away there. But she is a great actress! We have taught her the Restoration, and Faith and Repentance. We got her to pray about what we were teaching, but then she wouldn't pray again so that was kind of annoying. Oh well. We are teaching her about Baptism on thursday and will extend the invitation. The spirit will be there and she won't be able to say no.

Oh P.S. I have been called to be the Zone Music Coordinator. My ego has gone through the roof and I am officially better than everyone.   Just Kidding. But I get to go to Leadership Meeting with our Branch Presidency and It is a way nice time. But one of the counselors in the Branch Presidency, Brother Jones, who served in South America somewhere, emphasized that we aren't speaking Spanish enough. He says that he knows what it is like to go out and not understand a soul and he doesn't want that to happen to us. I have a goal to speak Spanish whenever I can but it isn't easy. Spanish needs to be my first language and English my second. It is SO hard not to resort to English sometimes and a lot of the time I give in. I pray for strength cada dia and am feeling a difference little by little. I am not there yet, but eventually I will be able to have that mind-set forever. Ugh. That day needs to come like today. But it won't. Thats ok. I need to work towards it.

Oh cool story we got to watch a talk be Elder Holland about how Missions are Forever. He shared a cool short poem in it and see if you can hear Elder Holland saying these words. They get louder as it goes on.

"Come to the edge," he said. "No, we'll fall."
"Come To The Edge," he said. "No, we'll fall."
"COME TO THE EDGE," he said. So we came to the edge
And he Pushed us. And we flew

He delivered this so powerfully! Sometimes we put limitations on ourselves that are really unreasonable. Sometimes we think we can't do things that we really are more than capable of doing. Sometimes we need a little push off the edge so that we can fly. I feel like we all go through this at one time or another.

Well that’s all for today. Love you so much! Thanks for the thoughts and prayers! I feel them! One speaker gave an interesting point. She said that throughout the church, literally millions of prayers are being offered up daily for the missionaries. I thought that was awesome!!! How can we fail? How can we not press on in so great a cause? Anyways Love you all so much!!!


Elder Mike Dial





P.S. Yes mother I am scrubbing my shirts. My district thinks I'm crazy. Be proud.