Week 9 (and pictures!)

 It was great to see Mandy's friend when we were volunteering! Yeah, I definitely miss cross country but being is a missionary is somehow even better. It definitely does take courage to knock on strangers doors and try and have a gospel conversation with them in Spanish but I know the Lord has helped me. No worries about the packages! When/if you send another one, it would be great to have that black running jacket cuz just like Utah, the days are warm and the nights are cool this time of year. No rush on that though, I'm doing great! We're taking small, simple steps with the ward mission leader and hopefully he understands the importance of living his life back on the path of the Savior. We have service once a week at the food bank here and then have other service randomly throughout the week. The apples here are everywhere and they taste great even if they take the people we want to teach away from us as they pick. I'm doing fine with the short sleeve shirts but will definitely need more once spring rolls around. As for the music, we listen to a lot of vocal point/piano guys and Disney because apparently Pres. Ware is a huge fan of it. We don't listen to it but if you want some of the music that the Hispanics here listen to, look up Los Canarios de Michoacan. An incredible missionary song that I think of when time are tough in general is ''The Harvest'' by Brandon Heath, it's the bomb.com. 

This week has really flown by and certainly, as usual, is full of ups and down. On Wednesday we talked with a guy who was just sitting outside watering his lawn by hand and just wanted to talk about Jesus but hopefully we'll be able to talk with him again and have an actual lesson.

Thursday was definitely one of the lows for sure. We helped a member move a piano which wasn't to bad but later we had a lesson with a guy we've talked with a few times and it was rough. We we're teaching the Restoration and when we got to the part about Joseph Smith, E. Kupferer turned to me and I tried to start talking but my mind went completely blank and I couldn't think of any Spanish at all. I ended up just saying it in English because he said he could understand but it still felt off. It really made me down that I dropped the ball on that and I was feeling sick to my stomach the rest of the night. 

Luckily the next day my prayers were answered because it was a great day. We had a lesson with our investigator who has an on date and it went great! We taught him the Doctrine of Christ and he really seemed to enjoy and understand it. It was a polar opposite from the day before and I could feel the phrases coming in Spanish to my mind from the Spirit.  Because of the picking season a ton of the people we work with have work every single day so we were worried he wouldn't be able to come to church very consistently. We asked him if he would talk with his boss about getting Sundays off and he immediately said yes. He definitely want to do whatever it takes to come closer to Christ and follow his commandments. If all goes well, he should be baptized in a few weeks! He's from Guerrero which means we also get to practice some Mixteco with him which is fun as well.

So this weekend we had stake conference and the Zone Leaders called and asked us is we would give a role-play in front of the whole stake.... Well, a few hours later they switched it to a talk so that was fun. Luckily, they were just messing with us and some other Elder's got to have the OPPORTUNITY to do a role play in front of the mission president and an area seventy. The conference was great and we even had our investigator come and he seemed to enjoy it. President Ware challenged all of the members to find one person this week to either give a Book of Mormon to or share your testimony with.

Yesterday after church was one of the strangest days ever. We were walking down in an area called Little Mex, which is basically a giant trailer park with lots and lots of Hispanics and dogs. It was pretty late and we had been tracting when this guy came running up to us. At first we were really surprised since he was talking in English but he said he had a few questions for us. Welp, he said he had watched a few youtube videos about the church and he claimed that the temple has devil symbols on it.... Yeah he told us some other weird stuff and then thanked us for our time and walked out into the night. A tad bit surreal but he seemed grateful to have someone to talk with.

The hand of the Lord is so real and even when experiences are rough he is always there. I've seen incredible changes in my life already and have been able to feel the Spirit in incredible ways. The Atonement of our Savior can not only forgive us but as it says in PMG ''through the Atonement everything unfair about this life can be made right because of Jesus Christ''. There's an incredible talk by Cleon Skousen that talks about the reality and power of the Atonement that we listened to that is extremely powerful, I think it's called, ''The Atonement'', definitely look it up.

''Faithless is he who quits when the road darkens.'' (from a fortune cookie the Zone Leaders got at a restaurant. The road is never completely dark when we trust in the Savior.

Love,

Elder Spackman

Cody finally sent photos! No captions but I'm guessing that the first 10 or 11 were taken in Mexico.