March 19, 2016

9 Days Left

Hello everyone!

This week has been great. Today started off with a bang because we decided to go to the temple early in the morning rather than the afternoon with the rest of our zone. We went to the 7am session and then got the best breakfast we've had since we've been here by far. They served belgian waffles, real hashbrowns and bacon at the temple and it was very well received. we're all pretty sick of the MTC food, so I think we'll probably go to the temple to eat one or two more times. The temple session combined with the breakfast were just a great way to start the day. 

This week was our last week of teaching investigators. We really enjoyed teaching our TRC investigator Viri and we invited her to prepare to baptism at the beginning of this week after a really good lesson. I extended the baptismal invitation she said yes, but I accidentally said ¨ser bautizado¨ instead of ¨ser bautizada¨ because we memorized it as bautizado, but shes a female.. oops. When I extended the baptismal invitation to Paula I corrected the mistake. We learned a ton from our teacher role playing Paula for our progressing investigator. We all can't wait to get out in the field to start talking to more people! We had our first skype TRC on thursday and that was way cool. We skyped Hermana Cortez, a member who lives in León Nicaragua, and it was super cool to hear about her life and share a short message with her. We were surprised to find that we could understand her very well even though it is kinda hard to hear over skype. Especially when you have a bunch of missionaries skyping in the same room and then on her end motorcycles passing by every few minutes. She shared with us her conversion story and told me a little about what the missionary work is like in Nicaragua. She said the majority of people are catholic, but most are willing to meet with and talk with the missionaries, the hard thing she said was getting them to follow through on commitments because most people aren´t big readers. It was way cool to talk with someone in Nicaragua, who I will probably meet at some point in real life. We have skype TRC again next week so I´m way looking forward to that. Most likely it´ll be someone from argentina this time. 

For the Tuesday devotional this week Elder Zeballos of the 70 talked which was cool because he came into our class on like the second day and role played as our first investigator. We watched a short clip of an Elder Bednar talk that is pretty exclusive, I think because he mentioned some specific blessing to the people he was adressing, so the church won´t put the talk up for viewing. Or something like that. Anyways he talked about how to recognize promptings of the spirit and he basically said ¨don´t worry about it¨. He said if you are doing what you are supposed to be doing and a good idea comes to your mind, just do it. You don´t need to sit there and question whether it is the spirit, just do what you feel to be right in the moment and the spirit will guide your thoughts and actions whether you are aware of it or not. Perhaps you´ll know it was the spirit in the moment, perhaps you´ll realize it was the spirit in retrospect, or perhaps you´ll never realize that the spirit was working through you. Oh and another random thought I had during this week.. None of the activities we do in the CCM are things I would consider fun. Studying, teaching, meetings,and waking up early are all not fun things. And I can't do all the things that I would consider fun like surfing, hanging out with family and friends, watching tv, using my phone. Yet somehow I'm happy and enjoying my time here. It's rather strange and also kinda cool. Ok that's all for this week!

Con Amor,

Elder Hamson