Week Three

Hola Todos,

This past week, I've been trying to be like the missionary that my mission president sees in me.  I feel like this week was a bit of a set back in a way.  After week two, I started to feel a little bit cocky in my language and doctrinal mastery and started to slack off a little more than I should of.  As a result, my companion and I didn't do as good in our teaching exercises as we could have, and we stopped making progress with our mock investigators.  It made me feel a little disappointed in myself.  The really hard part though, was when my mission president passed by us and called us the dynamic duo.  President Bennett has shown so much faith in our abilities and has treated us like we are rock star missionaries.  I didn't feel like that was the case after my last few lessons.  

So I started setting more short term goals, and revised how I studied,   Just earlier today, I got to go to the Mexico City Temple for the first time.  In our earlier studies, we had talked about how church attendance can bring us personal revelation if we go with a specific question that we want answered.  I decided to put the same practice into temple attendance.  I wanted to know how I could best relate the gospel to an investigator I have named Eliana.

As I went through the session, I felt the power of the spirit at an overwhelming level during this session.  It was nothing like I had never experienced before.  What was even stranger though was that I felt the spirit bearing truth to me at parts of the session that I had never bothered to take much note of before.  At the end of the session, I was certain that I needed to teach Eliana with a focus on how much our Heavenly Father cares for each one of us personally.  I'll let you all know how it goes next week.

In other news, I'm now part of a new program at the MTC that is trying to see what the logistics of having American missionaries transfer to have Latino companions after the first three weeks.  For those of you who don't know, at the Mexico MTC, Mexican and other Spanish speaking missionaries spend three weeks at the MTC, while we Americans spend six, so as to better learn the language.  The Idea of this study is that after three weeks, American missionaries would get paired up with the incoming Latinos.  So far it's been a blast.  I've been paired up for part of the day with a guy named Elder Espiritu, which translates into Elder Spirit.  We've been able to do a lot of good work together, and I've been able to learn a lot from him.  

As always, feel free to email me if you have any questions about my mission.