I can't believe that tomorrow will be exactly one month since I've been a missionary. Weird. Time goes by really fast...I need more time! So mom the investigators that we teach are our teachers. We have two teachers and we switch off teaching them for 20 minutes everyday. They act like investigators that they taught while on their missions and they don't break character so it's pretty easy to take it seriously. It's really fun and a really good learning experience. They always tell us funny mistakes we made during the lessons too. We also go to the TRC every Tuesday and teach two 20 minutes lessons to members who are either native Spanish speakers or know Spanish from their own missions etc. It's more like a visiting or home teaching lesson since they're already members. It's more relaxed because we don't have to worry about extending commitments. The TRC is my favorite and I always learn so much. My companion doesn't like it though. The guy in our last lesson made her cry because he kept correcting her Spanish. He was correcting mine too but I liked it. Thank you for sending me more tights. It was actually really warm this week so I didn't even wear them but I talked to an Elder who lived in San Jose and he said it gets pretty cool there so I'll probably end up wearing them there. Hopefully I won't need you to send me any more stuff...at least for awhile!
I voted last Friday...someone better write and tell me who the new president is (hopefully new). We don't hear anything in this place. Apparently there is a huge storm on the east coast? Anyone wanna fill me in on details? Is it near Grandma? On Sunday our district did a musical number and I played the piano. I also got called to speak so I gave my first talk in Spanish. It was fun! I'm sure I made a ton of mistakes...I know of one for sure. The talk was on baptism and I was talking about my friend on the track team who made a TON of changes in his life, got baptized and is now married in the temple. The word for tired is cansado and the word for married is casada. Well I said cansado "He is now tired in the temple" Luckily I noticed it though and corrected myself haha. Okay going back to the musical number...I was so nervous for some reason and I knew my hands wouldn't stop shaking and when my hands shake I always mess up so I was actually praying that they would call me to speak because it always calms me once I get up there. So when they called my name I was SO relieved and once I was up there speaking my hands stopped shaking and I was able to do the musical number right after without messing up. Maybe that's weird that I wanted to be called to speak but it helped. I also guessed correctly who the speaker would be two weeks ago and then I told everyone that it would be me this week so now they're all asking me who I think it will be next week. My president said that if he had known I was doing a musical number they wouldn't have called me to speak but I told him I was glad they did. President Roch (one of the MTC presidency members) was visiting in our sacrament meeting that day (which made me even more nervous for the musical number) but when he got up to speak after my talk he said it really is a miracle how much Spanish the missionaries learn in such a short amount of time.
Every time we sing "We'll Bring the World His Truth" I get major chills and feel the spirit so strong when we say "we are now the Lord's missionaries" I love being able to say that I am the Lord's missionary. We watched a film of a talk that Elder Bednar gave about the Character of Christ and how even when Christ was at his very lowest he still turned our towards others. For example, after he suffered in the garden of gethsemane and his apostoles ( I can't remember how to spell that in English) fell asleep and he got betrayed and handed over to the guards (then peter cuts off one of their ears) he FIRST thinks and acts to help the guard and heals his ear. He never turned in selfishly and never worried about himself. I have been trying to be more like that. Even if I think I DESERVE things to be a certain way I have been trying to give it up and always do things the way others want them done. Still got a lot of work to do. Even if you've been treated like crap do what Christ would do...he would turn out towards others and try to help them. If we make "helping others" our goal then there will always be something productive to do.
Our district did two full days of speaking only in Spanish and next week we are going to do three. Every week we are going to add a day so that by our final week we can go the entire week speaking only in Spanish. I love SYL (HSI in Spanish) days. We make a lot of mistakes but we cant actually communicate in Spanish to each other now. I can definitely feel Heavenly Father's help as I learn this language. And I can tell other's are praying for me.
At the fireside on Tuesday everyone was watching the doors waiting to see who would walk in (everyone is always hoping that it's one of the twelve) anyway I saw the speaker walk in and I 100% thought that it was Gordon B. Hinckley so I gasped and grabbed my companions arm but as soon as I did that I remembered that he's no longer even living. I felt pretty stupid but I had to explain myself since I grabbed her arm. For Halloween we did all we could to make it feel like a holiday. We all wore orange and black. Yup that's pretty much it haha. The district was going CRAZY though and it was so hard to study. Everyone was seriously bouncing off of the walls. Our lesson that day was definitely our best one yet though. He even broke character at the end and told us that we did a really good job. The weather was so nice that day so we went to study outside on the benches in the sun and apparently I fell asleep. I still insist that I was awake the whole time but another district in our zone said they walked by and I was fast asleep. They won't let me forget that either. In our second lesson last night I was setting up the next appointment and I wanted to say Friday but I said verde....I knew it started with a "v" He started laughing and just started naming off other colors.
How was Halloween back home though? Jessica are there more pictures of the Ball nephews from the day of? Did they have fun trick or treating? The weather was nice so I'm guessing they didn't freeze this year. You can send me the extra Halloween candy if Dad doesn't want to eat it all! Andrea your Halloween pics were so cute!! Did you wear your wedding dress? It was a small pic so it was hard to tell. Oh and did you guys get some pictures emailed to you? One of the sisters in my district sent her camera card home and I think her mom was going to email the pictures out to our family. Let me know if you get them..if not I'll send my card home before I go to Cali. We got two new roommates a few nights ago. They're SPanish speaking as well but they're only here for 3 weeks because they go to the D.R MTC. It's weird to think that they'll leave way before us even though we've been here FOREVER. Well my time is up so I need to go but I hope everything is going well back at home and I can't wait to hear from all of you soon!
Con amor, Hermana Billings
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