11-7-11

Hey madre, Well those are some cool pictures! I know it's weird to think about my homecoming, think how I feel! The time literally has flown by, and as the end is near and I am starting to have to face it, I'm now trying to continue to be diligent so that when I get home I continue to be a diligent member-missionary. I hope to be the member that I ask people to be for me. But, I've got 6 weeks until then! Going to make it a good transfer. Did Bishop have a certain topic that he would like me to address? To answer your question about my spanish prof. I just hopped online and asked her if I need to take aplacement test or what I need to do. I e-mailed her in spanish and she said that i'd be fine to enter her class, so I'm excited to do so! Well this week, Ashly and her Mom, Maria didn't make it to church, they had an "emergency." It seems that theseemergencies happen on a weekly basis, it's sort of frustrating. But we did have a great lesson with Maria and we're going back this week, so we'll see what happens. We set a baptismal date with Alicia Campos and her son Roger (8). We had a very interesting experience at Alicia's last night. Alicia's daughter's birthday was last night so Alicia invited us to come over and visit, have some cake, etc and so we did and upon arriving it was great. We sat down at the table next to a couple of members that were there and said hello to the people we didn't know. Someone asked us "are you brothers? you have the same name." So we told him no and explained that "elder" is a title given to us as missionaries. We sat down and I began to speak with Carmen (a member) and then another question was "what do you guys believe?" So I said "well, basically we believe that God loves all of us and that he still speaks so he calls prophets just like he did in the old days, to speak to us and tell us His will." This started the explosion. The man said "well I believe that there are many prophets in the world." and I responded that we believe in one prophet and that he was called by God and then I shared with them a parable that I made up, it goes like this. In a far away part of South America there was a class of spanish speakers that wanted to learn english. They had a lot of desire to do so and wanted to speak as perfectly as possible. Their teacher was one of the best, if not the best, and he was patient with each of his students. The teacher one day told the students that he needed to leave for a while, he had business to do in another part of the world. After a few days of having no teacher, the students began to worry -- they wanted to know how they were going to learn english without a teacher! So one student stood up and said "I'll teach the class, the teacher has left his notes here in his desk and I will teach you according to those words that he has left." So he did so, and a lot of people enjoyed his form of teaching, but another student thought that he could teach better, so he took a group that wanted to listen to him and teach English from the teachers notes, this happened with multiple students. One day, many years later, the teacher returned. The teacher looked around his classroom and saw that the class had divided! Each different group was speaking a different language, but none of them spoke English! The teacher then began to gather those that wanted to hear him again. But some of the students were now prideful, believing that they had learned English better than the teacher could teach them. I shared this story and let them know that this is why we are here as missionaries. To let people know that the Master has once again spoken and called a prophet. The spirit was there for about 0.002 seconds and then the beer got to them and we went all the way back to square one. It was a terrible experience. Hopefully it doesn't happen again. Those experiences are never worth looking forward to. Through all this, Alicia defended the church with her testimony, it was beautiful to see. She truly does have a testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ. Not much else to update on for this week. I love you and I'll speak to you next week! -Elder Conner Allred