"If you live the Gospel, you'll be happy. It's really that simple."

this week flew by soooo fast. i guess that is a good thing, right?

this week we found soooo many people to teach in the future. we spent a large portion of our week contacting and it paid off. hopefully we get some good progressing investigators from it. i am getting a lot better at contacting. i can actually get people to stay at the door and talk to me now. before they wouldn't give me 2 seconds. but now my spanish is getting good enough to talk to them. i think the difference is i am with elder edwards. with elder remon his spanish was good enough to talk to people about anything. whenever i tried to talk the people would just shut us out. this has changed with elder edwards. i have had to use my spanish more with people and it has paid off. i am definitely more confident. that being said it is still really hard for me to speak. if it is about the gospel i can do pretty good. but if it is about everyday life i have no hope. i am not complaining though because i can understand almost everything which is a huge improvement. i know it will come little by little.

it is really starting to warm up down here. we no longer see our breath in bed when we wake up in the morning. during the day we can get away with a light jacket. in fact, one day this week i wore a short sleeve shirt and it was glorious.

on thursday we were contacting a street and we saw a biker ride past us. just as he past us his brakes fell off his tire causing his tire to lock up. he flew over his handle bars and face planted. he didn’t have time to break his fall so his face took the whole impact. we ran over and there was soooooo much blood. his nose was shattered and cut open pretty bad.  we started scrambling in our bags trying to find something to stop the blood. i looked in my bag and found a stack of 30 napkins that i have no idea how they got there. we started to help him and as we did so he started to go into shock. he was loosing blood fast and was turning ghost white. we helped him enough to slow the bleeding enough. just then his brother drove past us and saw him. we put him in the car and he rushed him to the hospital. i honestly think if we weren’t there the situation wouldn’t have been as good. we were definitely supposed to be there at that time. i just gotta say i hate blood.

...I have spoken here of heavenly help, of angels dispatched to bless us in time of need. But when we speak of those who are instruments in the hand of God, we are reminded that not all angels are from the other side of the veil. Some of them we walk with and talk with—here, now, every day. Some of them reside in our own neighborhoods.  

Elder Jeffery R. Holland

I did a blogpost where I discussed the above video about earthly angels.  

You can also view the video and read the post by clicking here. 

remember the family that i talked about that we challenged to baptism? well, they all had the flu this week and then on the weekend they went up to the capital so we weren’t able to meet with them. but we have an appointment tonight so pray that it goes well, por favor.

things are going better. we are finding people and like i said i can understand a lot more. this is a huge blessing. i just cant wait until i can talk more but i’m happy with this. my testimony and faith have really grown. i know that if you live the gospel you will be happy. it is really that simple. and make prayer and scripture study a priority. i wish it was a bigger part of my life before the mission. it really makes your day better. thank you for all of your prayers. i love  you all.

Just as we need daily physical sustenance, Elder Christopherson talks about the need for daily spiritual sustenance is just as strong. We can remember Jesus Christ every day as we pray, read the scriptures, and meditate.

Daily Bread: Pattern

 You can also view the video by clicking here or you can read the transcript below:  

I think it's not by chance God has created us in a way that we have to have daily physical sustenance. The children of Israel, coming out of Egypt, lived for 40 years, approximately, on something called manna. They couldn't have lived from hunting, and their lifestyle was such that they couldn't be planting. So they really didn't have an alternative. God was, in essence, providing their daily sustenance. And I think at least one of His purposes was to teach them to remember Him, to think of Him, to look to Him, to have faith in Him, that He was the source of their life. He did it in the way of making it a daily thing. They couldn't gather up manna and store it. It would only be good for one day. They couldn't forget who was the source of their blessings.

There's a spiritual parallel in our day. We all recognize the need for physical sustenance. Hunger and thirst remind us very strongly if we forget. But the spiritual need for sustenance is equally strong. It comes not in drinking water and eating food, but in our constant, daily efforts of communion with God. We ought not to think that we can go weeks and months without spiritual sustenance and not suffer and not have a deadening influence in our spiritual life. Acknowledging the reality of our need for a daily spiritual administration, or manna, helps us increase in our courage to do the right thing and to serve others more than we would have if we ignored God.

People sometimes think, "Well, those are such small things. Prayer, immersing ourselves in the scriptures, pondering, meditating--how can that really produce a significant difference in a person's life?" But it does. As small as those things seem to be--as daily, routine, sometimes, they may seem to be--these are the kinds of things that, day by day, transform us.