Speaking the Language of Spanish!

Elder Santacruz just continues to sound great from week to week. He is learning a lot more Spanish and is so confident in his daily assignments. Here is his week 3 email, next week will be a month. Time is flying. Enjoy! :)

Como estan mi familia!

 

It is week 3 and boy was it a good week! Of course I learned a lot that is all I do here is learn things. This week started out great and it started out by us going to the university. The college is 10 blocks away and we got to go proselyting. I gave out my FIRST Book of Mormon on my mission. It was so awesome! Everyone that my companion and I talked with would listen to us everyone is so nice here! They all take time to hear our message and when they are not interested they say it after were done talking with them. I was so amazed of how patient they were with us because our spanish is not the best and they even helped us with our Spanish. My companion and I gave out 7 restoration packets and talked about Joseph Smith. A lot of them had questions we couldn't answer and their questions were the best but we still got our point across. We talked to one person that wanted to know more and we were talking with him for about 25 min about Joseph Smith and how we got the Book of  Mormon, it was so awesome!! I couldn't really understand all of his questions because he talked really fast but we gave him the book and the restoration pamphlet. He was waiting to talk to us because we were talking to this lady for about 5 min and he was waiting a few feet away. It was a great experience and we get to go again tomorrow and next week we get to go on splits!!!! Something that we get to do every Sunday is take a walk around the Temple, take pictures and we also get ice cream. I have some pictures taken at the temple I will send.

Something else that happened this week was we got to listen to a devotional that was broadcasted Richard G. Scott gave it and it was so powerful! What I got out of the talk was the power of prayer. He told us that as misssionaries it is vital for us to communicate with God. He said that we cannot be affective missionaries if we don't ask for help and tell him how things are going. He said to the missionaries that are learning a language, "You need to be patient and know that through and through hard work, you will have the gift of tongues." That right there comforted me because the language is still hard to learn. Conjugating is so hard sometimes but I just have to remember that I have been here for only three weeks and I know that I will get it down eventually.

 

This past Sunday we had a devotional from our MTC president. He told us something I never really thought about until now. He was saying us missionaries were forordained before we were here on earth. I pictured that God was on a stage and he called me by my name, told me to stand, and told me that I will be a missionary when I go down; to stand with my brother, to go to war against Satan and that this army is only getting better. When I think of that I just feel like I'm doing my purpose in life and it is the best feeling. 

 

On tuesday it rained so hard here! It was raining during our physical activity and it was awesome. Only three other elders wanted to go outside so we took a soccer ball and we played the whole time in the rain. It was like a hurricane but the rain was nice and warm and we just wanted to get used to it because we will be living in it for two years! 

 

We had a fake referall this week and it was so cool because I was talking spanish and it was crazy how much heavenly father helped me. My companion told me I did really good and he said that I was conjugating in preterit and imperfect. It was kinda cool! We're working so hard, my companion is a hard worker. Every free time we get we come to the computer lab and look up talks and we also use this program called TALL, it helps us with conjugating and helps us memorize irregular verbs. Those are the worst! We are working hard and us getting a long everyday strengthens us because we tell eachother more things about how we are feeling and that gives us more trust in eachother. Yesterday I had an opportunity to help him. He was having kind of a bad day, he said that he was feeling homesick and I told him things to make him feel better. I told him to give it a few more weeks and I promised that he will be so busy he won't have time to think about his family and be homesick. I told him he will have a new family out here soon enough and that we are his family now!

This week was amzing and so helpful! I am glad to be a missionary and thankful for the many blessings I have love you all! 

 

Elder Santacruz