BARCELONA!!!!

Dear Brother and Sister Keith,

We wanted to take a brief moment to let you know that your missionary has arrived safely in our beloved mission in Barcelona, Spain and we have had the privilege of getting acquainted with him.  He appears to be excited about his stewardship as an emissary of the Lord Jesus Christ and is ready to begin this great work.  How honored we feel to have your missionary in this special mission.  We truly believe that these great young men and women are the finest fruits of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Thank you for loving, nurturing, teaching, and supporting him in preparation for this marvelous mission experience.  His goodness, virtue, high character, enthusiasm, and love of the Savior are truly inspiring. 

We would encourage you to pray for your missionary and his investigators daily. We also suggest that you write weekly letters or e-mails (use myldsmail.net) of support and encouragement, send scriptures or inspiring talks, and especially let him know how much you love him. 

We can assure you that we will do everything we can to protect and take care of your missionary while he serves under our stewardship.  Please know that we feel a great responsibility to guide and teach “our” missionaries, and help make their mission experience the most significant time of their lives. Please feel free to contact us at mtdayton@ldschurch.org or debbie4est@gmail.com if the need arises.  We feel confident that the Lord will pour out great blessings on you and your family while your missionary serves the Lord in this beautiful land.

With much love and appreciation,

President and Sister Dayton

Spain Barcelona Mission  

P.S. We hope you enjoy this picture of your missionary next to the flag of this wonderful country. We encourage you to go to our blog, http://espanabarcelonamission.blogspot.com.es/, to see the activities he participated in on his first few days in the mission field.

We went up to Montjuic and let the new Missionaries look out over Barcelona. 

Week 5/6 Email to Family and Friends

I cannot believe I’m leaving the MTC in like 5 days I feel like I’ve been here forever.

This week has gone by so fast, and it’s becoming so real. I leave on Tuesday from the MTC early in the morning like 6 in the morning to catch a train at 7:30 to arrive in Barcelona at 10:30 in the morning. The first day I’m in the mission I will have a temporary companion who I will do basic daily things with and the next day I will find out where I will serve and who my companion will be, I’m so excited! I feel so ready to go out there. 

This past week has been the same grind each day not too much difference to the schedule or any new experiences. This week we played soccer every day which I’ve loved it’s been so fun to play with some Spanish speakers and feel their love for the sport and get better each day. We’ve had our normal classes each day and just yesterday we learned our final grammar principle we will learn in the MTC, overall we have learned around 30 Spanish grammar principles which is insane - so much info to take in. We’ve taught lessons each day and just been trying our best to improve each day.

Saturday we had new companions for park days and I was assigned to Elder Sever with Elder Peñaranda who is a Spanish speaking Elder from Columbia. Honestly, in the beginning, I was not too excited, he seemed like he would be really shy to talk to people and our personalities would contradict or something like that, but it ended up being nothing like that. The guy's testimony is so sincere and his knowledge of the Gospel is so large. He taught me new things too - stuff I never knew about. It was such a humbling experience everyone seriously never judge a book by its cover. The first people we spoke to was a family and actually before we left the MTC to go to the park Retiro he was prompted to bring The Family: A Proclamation to the World pamphlet. He spoke with this family and he gave them the pamphlet and a Book of Mormon, they were really interested and I’m so glad we spoke to them. He told me how he is a convert to the gospel and that he was Catholic before. A man asked in the park about why we have “another Bible” and he said we shouldn’t add anything to the Bible. And Elder Peñaranda explained well actually this isn’t true, he explained how actually Catholics and other Christian sects are kind of hypocrites when they say this because they have these books from prophets which they claim to be scripture but aren’t in the Bible. I don’t know what they’re called but the word for them is in the dictionary thing at the end of the Book of Mormon. This just makes me believe more and more that our church has it right.

We have taught lessons each day and they’ve gone really well. My Spanish is improving a lot each day. We’ve taught about the Plan of Salvation and the doctrine of Christ lessons in Preach My Gospel lately and I’ve become really familiar with them. We had one lesson with one of our “investigators” who asked just doctrinal questions the whole lessons we didn’t teach anything we prepared to teach that day. This is totally fine and the teacher was really impressed with my answers and my ability to explain and answer all her questions in Spanish. She said I have a gift to be able to explain things clearly and simply which made me feel really good. My companion said almost nothing in that lesson but he said it was fine cause he said I was killing it and he didn’t want to mess up the groove hahaha. Another lesson that was great is we had one of our investigators commit to being baptized which me and Elder Fryer haven’t been able to do with any of our other investigators. The lessons was great except for one moment where they asked how the baptism is performed and I forgot the words to the baptismal ordinance in Spanish and had to try and translate from English to Spanish the best I could.  It was a whoops moment but they were very understanding. At the moment I feel really confident teaching and I feel like if I went right into lessons tomorrow Iin the field I could. I love to teach so much.

Oh ok one cool experience is they changed the angel Moroni on the Madrid temple last Saturday morning and we got to witness it. It was so different to see the temple without an angel on the top and also to see the angel Moroni hanging from the crane in the air was cool.  It was like a real angel flying through the air.

Today is the last P-day and we picked up our residency cards making us official Spanish not citizens but officially legal and able to live in Spain.  We also went to Puerto de Sol in midtown Madrid again to shop and other things as our last P-day in the MTC. I bought 3 ties for 10 euros today, it was such a steal and really I need more ties I’m getting bored already of the ones I have. We also went to this burger place called good burger that we bought 2 big hamburgers for 4 euros and they were some of the best hamburgers I’ve ever had no joke.  I really needed some American food. We saw one of the royal palaces in Madrid too.  I guess they have like 4 sets of monarchies or kings here I’m not totally sure but we saw one of the palaces and it was massive. We visited an old cathedral that had so much stuff in the inside, the Catholics have so many services, ornamental items, and statues inside it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Very beautiful but I’m ok with what we have in our church hahaha. It was a really good P-day, one my favorites but I’m excited to go into the field and enjoy P-day there.

So the World Cup is going on and I’m going crazy that I can’t watch it. Spain is going crazy for their national team and I want to be out there watching and celebrating with them. They set up portable screens all around the city like the big blow up ones even literally right around the corner from the MTC and it’s torture to not watch. And they celebrate loud at the goals and set off fireworks a lot. Elder Jacobson an Elder from my district was walking towards the window one of these nights and they set off a giant firework right across the street from the MTC and he thought it was a bomb and he started freaking out and yell to the group in surprise. It was so funny but after that, they did a firework show right after we could watch from our window that was so pretty.

I’ve tried more and more to add more spiritual thoughts and things into my studies lately, every night I listen to General Conference talks the most recent was called "Be Ye Therefore Perfect Eventually" by Jeffery R. Holland from October 2017 which is a really really good talk. Also we watched a devotional where Elder Bednar explained to us a good way to make big decisions or gain more spiritual knowledge on a certain topic is to take a cheap Book of Mormon (the paper, blue-covered kind) and read it all, marking it through as you go and after you finish to write a short summary of what you learned and he promised you will find the answers and knowledge you will need and look for. I started this and I’m almost through 1 Nephi. 

Honestly, I’m sad to leave the MTC and excited to enter the field, it’s a lot of mixed emotions. I love this opportunity to be here and I thank everyone for the emails and prayers it’s helped a lot. I would love to hear from everyone so please email and send pictures. We are totally locked out from the outside world and it gets so hard some days but an email or 2 gets me through really well. Next time I send an email may be in over a week but I will be in the field with many new things to talk about!

Elder Keith 

Week 5 .... a little more to Mom and Dad

Finally I can email but honestly, I don’t have a ton of things to say. Spain has been good I went through another week of stomach aches but I’m getting better. I really want to leave the MTC right about now. I want to go explore and leave sitting in a classroom all day every day. I think I’m gaining weight here. We literally almost never get out. My companion is doing fine he’s getting better at Spanish but slow and steady it’s been a struggle. I’ve had a good time with all the guys in my district we’ve been telling lots of stories and I literally don’t have time to type all the funny stories we have it’s been really great. I started reading Jesus the Christ. It’s a really good book really hard to read and so I figured my English is getting worse so I should read it now or months later I won’t be able to understand it at all. My Spanish is getting a lot better I really should send a video of me speaking but I don’t have a lot of time. Please pray for me to understand all the grammar though cause lots of these new concepts are hard for me to understand. I’ll add one good story that happened recently. So every Sunday we sing outside the temple around 5 o'clock or so and we wear suits all day Sunday. We’re out singing and we just finished and Elder Clarke goes to check the time on his watch and he lifts up his arm and a bird flies by and lays a huge poop on the arm of his suit.  It was so disgusting hahaha!  We have a good laugh about it sometimes it was so unfortunate. 

Anyways I don’t have much else to say, ask me questions if you have any and please send me pictures. Keep me in your prayers!

Love you,

Elder Keith

Week 5 - Email to Friends and Family

I cannot believe I only have a little over a week left here in the MTC, it feels like I’ve been in this place for forever now.

This week has been great, very busy like always but really good. Last Saturday we went to a naval museum for p-day and it was cool I have never been in such a formal museum before, it was literally a group of 12, 19-year-old elders in this museum and not to bag on Spanish culture or history but the paintings of their past kings are hilarious. We had a good time hahaha.

Last Friday was pretty normal, we have 2 lessons we teach every day and we have been progressing our investigators far each day.

Saturday at the park was awesome I was put with a native Spanish speaker from Honduras named Elder Serrano. He’s awesome and we worked so well together. He could explain the parts I can’t so well in Spanish and together we placed 4 Books of Mormon and got 2 references which wasn’t too bad. One of the people we spoke to who was one of the references took the Book of Mormon we gave her and she lit up she had this sudden urge to really listen and take the book and read it, she seemed really interested which I’m really glad for her. I learned two things from this last trip the first was how hard it is to take rejection. We go out as missionaries as volunteers in this work to spread the gospel which we know to be true. At least 5 instances we gave the Book of Mormon to someone and they took the book look at it and think for a second and then turn it away and give it back. And I guess they’re not ready but to see someone turn down the truth right in front of them is hard to take in. Second, I had a deep spiritual experience of my testimony of eternal families and the Plan of Salvation grow. We sing every time at the end of our park trip and me and my companion were late. On our way back we felt we needed to talk to one guy and his girlfriend or something he was talking to and it started off great. Serrano was talking to the guy he loved our message and then we talked about through prayer we can know about the truth of the BOM. And he shut off automatically. He shared how he doesn’t believe in prayer and that God listens to us because his grandma passed away years ago and he didn’t know why God would allow bad things to happen to good people and why she would pass away so young. Elder Serano shared in the gospel with the Book of Mormon we can answer these questions through prayer and he shared he wouldn’t and that if we know the answer that we should tell him right in that moment and we were late so we couldn’t explain the whole Plan of Salvation to him and we couldn’t give him an answer and he wouldn’t take the Book of Mormon and in this moment I could feel the Spirit very strong and the Spirit testified to me that even if this man is ready and humble enough to listen to my message that we still have the answers to these questions and the knowledge of eternal families in the Gospel.

Sunday we had testimony meeting and it was good to hear the testimonies of many of the new missionaries here the Russian learning missionaries and as well the native Spanish speakers. I added my testimony too and we could really feel the spirit there more than most other testimony meetings. Also we fasted for 24 hours. We fasted dinner on Saturday night and breakfast Sunday morning and even though before the fast I was so scared to fast for 24 hours because it was my first time but I survived and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be and definitely can trust in Heavenly Father more.

Monday through Wednesday are pretty normal days with classes and more lessons. This week with grammar we covered a lot of pronouns as well as the imperative tense which is basically commands and it’s extremely difficult to conjugate and it’s really been hard to put together but we’re doing it. We had some very good lessons with our investigators and we thought about the plan of salvation as well as the restoration and progressed our investigators far and got them to begin praying. One of the lessons that we taught stood out to me a lot. In this lesson we talked about this life on earth and many aspects of it such as the creation and the fall of Adam and ended with the Atonement in the section about the Atonement we discussed how through the Atonement we can find answers to many hard moments in life that are unexplainable and cause us lots of grief and we related it to her and her experience with her grandmother who passed away young and she said she would pray to find the answer to why this happened and the Spirit was very strong there. We ended up going 10 minutes over our allotted time for lessons but the teacher dismissed it because it was such a good lesson.

The temple is closed these last two weeks of the time we're here for cleaning and so we don’t have the opportunity to do any sessions but they’re actually taking the statue of Moroni off the top and cleaning or replacing it and we get to witness them putting it back up. Because we have more time today we are going to this castle close to Madrid for the day with all the missionaries and checking out all the sights around it and I’m really excited, plus they’re taking us to McDonald’s and seriously I’m dying for some American food right about now. American food and music are the two hardest things I’ve had to let go recently and it’s been a struggle. We’re not allowed to sing any songs that aren’t hymns and I’m like a jukebox of American songs sometimes. We have to do 10 push-ups for every non-hymn we sing and let’s just say my arms are pretty sore.

I have a really funny story to tell everyone from one of my friends in my district here. His name is Elder Taylor and he’s from Utah. He knows almost no Spanish and so his speaking is rough, really rough. He writes down most of the things he wants to say to better convey his message and in his lesson he had a prayer written down to help him. In his investigator lessons, they got their investigator to pray for the first time but she said she didn't know how to pray so Rock Paper Scissors later between Taylor and his companion and Taylor decides to help her pray. He begins the prayer well but then says gracias for el evanjulio, not evangelio ( which is gospel in Spanish) and his companion started busting up giggling hard. Taylor was trying to hold in the laugh too and tried so hard he let out this giant, loud like 10-second long fart in the middle of the prayer. They both start dying and Taylor goes - ummmm en el hombre de Jesucristo amen. Says lo siento and runs out with his companion so fast. We were literally dying. He was so embarrassed but it was definitely a moment to remember.

Thank you everyone for the emails and pictures I enjoy seeing them all so much. Please send me more pictures and emails I love to catch up with everyone. Thank you all for your prayers and everything. My ability to teach and open my mouth to teach lessons and speak Spanish has increased so much this last week I’m feeling so much more ready for the field. Thank you all hope to hear from everyone.
Elder Keith

(Also this is the first p-day we can wear normal clothes, not white shirts and tie. It’s literally the best feeling ever I needed this so bad.)

(The guy in the chair in the first picture is elder Taylor.)

Week 4 (I think) - an email to family and friends

Hey everyone! This is my email for like week 4 or something like that. Madrid has been good but I’m ready to head to Barcelona for sure. Not that my Spanish or teaching is perfect but the repetition of the MTC and sitting in a chair for 11 hours a day is killing me. I’ve been really tired but two more weeks and I’ll push through.

This last week we went to this plaza in Madrid for Christopher Columbus and it was really cool. They also had this Spanish flag there that was so big I feel like you could cover a two-story house completely in it. Saturday we went to the park and I went this time with Elder Flake as my companion and we’re so alike. He’s from New York and from when I met him he was really shy and to himself but at the park he’s another guy. He opens his mouth and doesn’t give up on anyone like I’ve never seen anyone before. He’s like a salesman who’s really good at his Job. We gave out in 2 hours: 7 Books of Mormon, got 6 references and gave out about 3 or 4 pamphlets. We were at least 2 or 3 above the next best companionship in each category. We speak the same amount of Spanish and ever since then we’ve been hanging out more. He’s going to the Barcelona mission too so maybe one day we could be companions. 

Sunday we had a devotional for all the Europe area for church and it was cool but so tiring most of the missionaries fell asleep during the talks.... oh well hahaha. Usually, on Sunday we give talks in Spanish with our companion giving a translation but this week was different and we had a little break. 

Yesterday we had a member of the Quorum of the 70 come, his name is Elder Johnson who is the President of the Europe area. He gave a great talk about President Nelson’s talk on revelation and seriously it’s like the 4th time we’ve had devotionals on this talk apparently it’s a really important talk for missionaries. But he talked a lot about working with the spirit as missionaries which is something I’ve wanted to know about more and more since I got here. Earlier that day we also had a talk from Elder Bednar we watched on tv and it was also about the Spirit. We have these devotionals that they show only in MTC's, which is sad cause they’re literally some of the best talks I’ve ever heard in my life but I guess it’s a choice blessing for those missionaries. No one else will ever see them but they’ve helped me so much. Elder Bednar talked about how some people seriously worry too much about receiving this oh-so-powerful prompting all the time. He said to stop worrying about it and live your life as you should keeping all the commandments, staying worthy of the Spirit and it will come even when you don’t realize you’re receiving promptings. He shared this story where he was with Elder Packer who visited Bednar while he was one of his missions in Germany and Bednar gave Packer 20 dollars in German money cause he thought maybe he would get hungry. Packer didn’t spend it but eventually he got to East Germany (Germany was split up at this time) and when going though passport check they wouldn’t let his wife go through, they didn’t accept her passport. Elder packer took that 20 dollars and put it in her passport and then gave it to check and they let them in the country. He called it righteous exchange not bribing hahahaha! But really that idea to give Elder Packer 20 dollars was a prompting from the Spirit even when Elder Bednar didn’t realize or think it was. 

Many new missionaries came today with lots of Spanish speaking natives who are beginning their three weeks. They’re all great guys all from different parts of the world and all speak faster than a bullet train goes down the tracks. We’re technically, all of us who have been here 3 weeks) the senior companionship’s but they’re ahead of us in Spanish so it feels even hahaha. 

The food is good we’ve had nothing too out of the ordinary so far but definitely food I would never think of eating back in the States. They’ve made lots of American food too, like one day they had broccoli and steak. Like what is this place hahahaha!

Today we’re going to the temple and the session will be all in Spanish and if we’re willing to do it we will do the veil in Spanish for those who know what I mean. It’s a cool opportunity and because 80% of my Spanish knowledge is gospel related I can understand pretty much the whole session in Spanish. 

We’ve learned all the past and future tenses now in Spanish and it’s literally so much info like now I know the tenses but I can hardly use them. I’ll need to practice more the next two weeks for sure. 

I’ve been reading in the Book of Mormon in 2 Nephi lately.  For those who have read this part, it’s Isaiah chapters but someone in a devotional here described how not so bad those chapters are and so I was like "eh why not I’ll try reading them again" and it’s been awesome. My fav scripture is in 2 Nephi 7:40 which talks about how no commandment given to us from God is too hard.  Everyone should go and read it I highly recommend it. 

Anyhowsers, I don’t have much time but please everyone pray for me daily and send me emails and pictures. I love to see pictures. Thanks you all for your prayers. I can feel them all.  The gift of tongues is real you guys have totally helped me. Thank you all love you all I’ll talk to you next week! 

Elder Keith 

These are pictures first of the giant flag, this picture doesn’t do it justice 

 And second of all the missionaries in the MTC before all the Spanish natives came. Elder Flake who I talked about in my email is the Elder to the right of all sisters in the emails.  He’s the white guy. 

Week 4 or something... an email to Mom and Dad

Hey, I don’t have much time to respond but I learned I can make videos too to extend my emails so I made a quick video. This week has been great and I’ve enjoyed all of it. P-day was fun when we went to this plaza for Chris Columbus and saw the biggest Spanish flag I’ve ever seen in my life. Park was good and all the food has been great. Still not agreeing with all of it.  It is still like bad cafeteria food sometimes but it’s been good. The language is coming well and giving lessons has been getting easier. Please continue to send pictures and emails I can read them all and it helps give me a short break from my long tiring week. 
Love you, 

Elder Keith

Also, I forgot to mention we watched altogether the 40th anniversary of black members being able to receive the priesthood. It was a broadcast on tv and it was one of the most spiritually uplifting things I’ve ever seen the church put on. It was awesome if you or the family haven’t watched it, find it online and watch it for family night or something.  It was incredible.
Elder Keith