Hey all! How are you doing?! Things this week were actually pretty boring. We just had our regular schedule, lots of class. The language and all is coming along alright! I always look forward to p days so i can hear from you guys and know what’s going on at home, and every p day we go to an early morning temple session. Going to the temple each week is the best! I absolutely love it.
Every day here I feel the Lord’s hand ever present in my growth and development making me into who He needs me to be. As I read your emails and receive your letters, I already see prayers being answered! We got to watch conference this week, it was great! However we aren’t watching the final session until this evening, so no I haven’t seen Elder Holland’s talk on faith yet!!! But I am pumped!! He is the best. My favorite talk by Elder Holland is "Safety for the Soul." Please go watch it! It is so powerful. Nothing better than hearing the words of the Lord through his prophets and apostles. I wish they would send an apostle here to speak to us in our little MTC! We always get to watch the recordings of old devotionals from Provo. They are still great though! I’ve seen a few friends on them singing! Kind of funny. We were watching one and they showed the piano player for the hymn, and this girl was like "That’s my mom!" and just started bawling...kind of sad! I do miss Utah, but I love it here. Spain is great! I can’t wait for you all to come and see. I will try to send some pictures but the computers here at the MTC are slow as anything!
So dad you wanted a story of us teaching our pretend investigators! It’s really not that exciting! Just lessons and testimonies. This last week we taught our "new" investigator, Ana. It was pretty cool, we got talking about the trinity and we explained that God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost are separate beings, and she was like "So what is the Holy Ghost? What form is he in? In the paintings he is a dove," and all these questions. So we continued to explain all of that, and drew it into prayer, and the importance of praying and the blessings that come from it and how the Holy Ghost testifies to us. Kind of tough with just a few weeks of the old Espanol, but when I bore my testimony and gathered up all the words my memory could put out, she just said “Wow, nobody has ever spoken to me this way with such conviction and sincerity. I can tell that these are sacred and important things.” Pretty cool coming from an "investigator" that didn’t know if she believed in God and did NOT believe in prayer or want to pray! Needless to say she prayed at the end of the lesson after I prayed for a little example. Everyone else says they have such a hard time teaching and we keep getting these great results! I’m excited for a real investigator.
So as far as news here, this week they made me a Zone Leader here in the MTC. I’m glad I have the opportunity to lead a little and serve in that spot! The food here is so weird. We have a lot of carrot soup, fish, sometimes shark, squid, pork, rice with sea urchins and clams, I guess it’s healthy though! This week we had stinkin hot dogs!!!!!! Hallelujah! Holy smokes were those good. The ketchup here isn’t as good...but i just loaded those dogs up and enjoyed some Americana comida!! Muy bien! Over here they don’t really like salt so anything in America that is salty (like ketchup) has about half the salt. So we just all add it in.
Lately we’ve been playing a lot of soccer! I’m not great, haha size 14 feet aren’t an advantage in that game;) but hey I do alright! Just so y’all know, over here instead of saying hey what up homie? Their word in Spain for homie is "trunk" like a tree trunk. All the gangsters over here call us "trunkos" haha! “Hey what up trunko?!” Kind of funny. I bet they think our words are ridiculous too!
Stories about teaching in the park: I have a great one! So Friday I got this awful cold and Saturday I woke up feeling awful. Probably the world’s worst cold. Headache, sore throat, congested like crazy, felt exhausted, it wasn’t good! But the moment I woke up on Saturday, I had this impression that I promised someone I would find them, and today was that day. Kind of weird so I said you know what? Colds are stupid and Satan just stinks, so I’m going out to Goya! (the city we go to teach in). I woke up, got some Dayquil and someone had some blue pills for colds, I just drugged up haha. So I’m feeling so bad, drugged up, exhausted, and we go to the metro. I had to get a new metro ticket so I put my debit card in the machine, and guess what?!?! It got stuck. The machine had my debit card. So we had to call someone to come and open it up and get my card etc.
We got to Goya Park finally and me and my temporary companion went out walking. It was rough! It was right during siesta time and every. single. person. we approached just denied us hard. Nobody wanted to talk to us, people ignored us, people laughed at us, it totally sucked and that went on for like an hour straight!! I had been praying all day that I would find this person I knew I was supposed to. I was just like what the heck? Everything is going wrong today. So we came to this intersection, and I just prayed and said please let me find this person to talk to. I don’t know who they are or where they are. Just please make it happen. I’m putting myself out here for them, and I don’t want to go home empty handed after all this. So we got to this intersection and my comp said which way do you want to go? Left or straight? And I said neither, we’re going right. It was this tiny, empty, road full of nothing but we took it.
About a block down, there was a woman just standing there. Not a single soul or sound around this place, but she was just standing by the street light. We approached her and I started explaining the Book of Mormon. From the beginning she was interested, so I explained what the book was, and right as I was going to have her read Moroni’s promise, her husband came up out of nowhere and joined the conversation. Turns out he is dyslexic, so perfect timing for her to read that promise aloud to them both. That guy had the light of Christ like you can’t believe! It’s so cool to just see it in people’s eyes. We explained that it was a promise from God, etc. and they said they are married in the Catholic church, but have been kind of looking and are very open to other religions and were so grateful for the free book (nothing in Spain is free so it was a big deal to them) when they said they were married, I immediately felt prompted to pull out a card with a picture of the temple. I gave it to them along with a proclamation to the family, and I just laid it out and bore my testimony to them on eternal families. Where did the words for this come from? Not me. But I did it and they felt it. They both just looked at me and said thank you so much for all of this, and I asked if they would want to know more and have some other missionaries who knew better Spanish come speak and teach them more, and they both said yes. Then the guy said we are leaving to England in two weeks, can they still talk to us? And of course I said yes! There are missionaries everywhere, we will make sure they contact you and whether you’re here in Spain or over in England, we can take your contact info and email and get a hold of you and get you with some missionaries. It was so cool. I was supposed to find that couple and I did despite my pretty bad day. If I wouldn’t have gone out, by the time I was in Goya again, they would’ve been lost in England without a Book of Mormon. It was a cool experience to find those people.
Tell Ty I love him and I wore his tie here, and that I pray for him every day. I hope he and Kim are well and I hope he is happy. I love him and Heavenly Father does too. Ask him how work is? How is his new job? Have him email me!
Well, that about sums up my week! Tell everyone I say hi and I love them and would love to hear from them! I hope you all have a great week, you are all in my prayers, I love you!
Love Elder Smith
