Tender mercies & 'El Don de Lenguas es verdad'

September 14, 2017

Tender mercies & 'El Don de Lenguas es verdad'

Hello Everyone!!

It’s been one crazy week down here in the CCM. Words can’t describe everything that is going through my mind right now. I want to start off with more of a spirtitual exerperience and it happened even before I got to the CCM. It was when I was at the airport, just barely about to leave the 801 for two. I had just said bye to the fam and when I arrived to my gate all sad and lonely a group of missionaries from the Provo MTC were at the same gate. All these elders immediately saw me walking alone and kinda with my head down. But they noticed me and shot up out of their chairs to come say hi to me. It was seriously a tender mercy for me. I knew right there that my Heavenly Father was looking after me at a time where I felt alone and lost. I know that He will always be there for me over these next two years when I need comfort, no matter what, and I have relied on Him already quite a bit these past couple days.

But enough with the deep stuff. My week has been awesome! All day Tuesday, the day I arrived, I had to stick with the couple people I knew from the ride from the airport because I couldn’t find my comp. We had a worldwide devotional on Tuesday night streaming from Provo with the whole CCM. Tried to spy my man Dougie, Goch and the East Squad in the crowd but no luck. Elder Oaks gave a really awesome talk but the network connection crashed halfway through so that was a bummer. Anyways before Elder Oaks spoke, I look back and see my man, Elder Harrison, walking in. Was literally about to cry. I shot up and gave him the biggest hug. He then said, "Dude, I know who your comp is. Come meet him.” My comp is Elder Broadhead, he’s from St Geezy and is such a stud. We hit it off right away. He and Wyatt were on the same flight and he told me that the whole flight down Wyatt was talking about us being down here together and turns out Broadhead got the inside scoop on me before knowing we were comps! lol We get back to our casa and guess who’s in our house with us... yep, Wyatt! Can’t even say how happy I am that I get to hang with Wyatt literally every day. We are in different districts but our districts do almost everything together and have the same schedules so I’m always eating some grub with him. I can’t go into detail about all the other homies in our casa and district cause there is not enough time but all are great. We all stick together and in only a week we have all become so close. Such studs!

I love the CCM. There are a bunch of super cool Elders that we hang with. My Spanish has improved so much it's crazy. Just in 7 days of legit spanish class I have learned how to pray, bare my testimony, share a scripture, and scramble together a good amount of sentences in Spanish. I’ve memorized the missionary objective, the baptismal invitation, and the whole first vision in Spanish and am half way through Moroni’s Promise found in Moroni 10 verses 4 & 5. Take a look. Super awesome scripture. El Don de Lenguas es verdad. Today I went and balled with all the hispanics in some futbol and taught them that gringos can play too. They stopped talking crap after 5 minutes once I scored 3 goals on them. Now we are tight. But playing with them helped my Spanish out so much. In class, they threw all of us into teaching investigators our second day here, all in Spanish of course so kinda scary. But I have learned so much about the lessons this week so I’m getting to the point where I can stop looking straight down at my notebook with all my notes of the lesson and actually teach our investigator while looking her in the eye. Starting Saturday we start teaching two investigators so we will see how that goes. My teachers are Hermana Gonzalez and Hermana Cardenas and they are dope. It was sweet, one day I was struggling a lot with my Spanish after having a super good morning and I told Hermana Cardenas how frustrated I was. The next morning I come to class and by my bag there’s a little present with a couple plastic bags full of mexican candy from Hermana Cardenas. She wrote a little note and said whenever you’re stressed, eat a couple of these and you’ll feel better. Literally made my day and to know how much these teachers care about us. It is awesome. But you know me, the second I got home I ate all the candy sitting in bed, so worth it.

Elder Broadhead and I got called to be District Leaders our second day here. It has a lot of responsibility but our district is awesome and works well with each other so they make it easy on us. As a district we set a goal to be pacencia, or patient, as the language develops and it’s helped a lot. Another goal was to celebrate the small victories so that has kept us all going. From our meetings with our branch president we hear a lot of things about companionships struggling to get along and problems in their district but we are really lucky to not have any of that. We all get along, sometimes too well so it takes us away from studying but hey, it’s all the experience right?

Funny experience. Elder Frey, my man, left me a big jug of Dr Pepper when he left for McAllen so I decided to take the jug of Dr Pepper to dinner yesterday to share with all the homies. Walking in though a random Hermana saw me holding the DP and was like oh my gosh where did you get that!!! She was a cutie, so knowing me I had to give the cute hermana a little something something and offered to pour some into her cup. The second I opened it the whole bottle exploded everywhere!! And I mean everywhere. My white shirt drenched in Dr Pepper! It was classic!! hahahah luckily it only really got on me and the floor and not the cute hermana but smooth move right... kinda forgot that Broadhead and I had been tossing it around before walking into dinner, LOL

I feel the love and support I have all the way down here. Love you all so much and thank you so much for all the thoughts and prayers. Remember to read Moroni 10: 4-5 and take the challenge!

GO UTES BABY!!! UGLY FOOTBALL IS UTAH FOOTBALL
Elder Christensen
deficil es bien