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
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