First Week in the Field

Hola mi familia y mis amigos

 

  Well, here I am in Salt Lake City.  And it is fantastic.  My first area is Rose Park, which is in northern Salt Lake.  I'm in the Rose Park North Stake and we have a spanish ward that we cover.  My companion and trainer is Elder Torres from Tampico, Mexico (I don't know if I spelled the city correctly).  He's fluent is both spanish and english, so my spanish is getting better each day.  During the lessons I can only understand the overall message of what people are saying, nothing specific.  But it works out because my companion translates if I need to understand anything more specific.  Unfortunately, when it comes to normal conversations with people, I can hardly understand unless they slow down their speech so that the words don't slur together.  Give me a few more weeks/months and I'll be able to understand it all (hopefully).  We teach an average of 4 lessons each day but that number is going to increase.  As of right now, there are eight people who we are teaching who plan to be baptized this month.  There's one amazing family of 8 who all plan to on being baptized on April 28 (all of them that are over eight years old, which is the age that people can be baptized in our church).  And just so everyone knows, we aren't supposed to use names in our emails of the people we're teaching, so you won't be able to learn any of there names (we might be allowed to use last names, so I'll find that out and give last names next week if I'm allowed).  We're also working with a man who has a baptismal date for the 14 of April. 

  One of them most special families for me is a family of three, a father who isn't a member of our church, his wife, who is a member, and their two year old son.  The father initially seemed very against listening to us and has met with missionaries for many years.  In our first lesson we spent much of the time talking about why there is suffering in the world, which is always a hard topic to discuss.  But it was a powerful, powerful lesson.  We can't tell what, but something has happened in his life to make him a little bitter against God, but his attitude is changing a little each day.

  I would definitely like to give a shoutout to each of my teachers in the MTC right now, because each of them have directly impacted what I've done so far.  Hermano Sagers: I literally used the exact same scriptures with the father of this family that we shared with you when you acted as your investigator.  It fit perfectly with his question.  Hermano Wassom: Unfortunately the father doesn't want to put much effort in, so we're using some of the same ideas that we used to show Francisco that he wants to work.  And Hermano Zenger: We haven't directly used anything from Fernando (mostly because we only taught him three times) but I have been told be almost every member that my accent sounds fairly good, which I totally attribute to you working with me.  And Hermano Irrizary: your ideas about getting to people to church are going to be tested this sunday.  Ten of our investigators came on Sunday, but four or five didn't, so we're going to use your idea this Sunday to help them out.

   And by the way, we actually did end up performing last Sunday during the devotional.  I'll be honest: I was freaking out.  There are very few things on this planet that scare me, but performing piano in front of people is one of them.  But, it went almost flawless.  The mics made some funky noises in the first 30 seconds or so, but it actually relieved all of our nerves a little.  The four singers sounded fantastic and shockingly enough, I hardly messed up. 

 

-Elder Colton