Week 3

Well this week has flown by!  I can't believe it's already P-day again.  I wanna send a quick shoutout to Elder Van Wagoner who is now in Ghana, and am excited to recieve Elder Larsen in the next week.  It's honestly like a high school reunion here.  This past week I saw Elders, Bill Richards, Jesse Saltsgiver, Jonathon Knudson, Marshall Hawkes, Jeremy Rock, Austin Millis, Josh Vance, Colton Parker, etc.  It's crazy! Things are never boring here either, someone is always making some funny language mistake or some strange activity is going on back at our Residence Hall.  For instance one Elder in our zone said to an "investigator" that through the spirit he would feel pez in his heart.  He meant to say paz which means peace, pez means dead fish.  My companion told one investigator that God wants to know the true gospel, that was pretty funny, and another Elder tried to say it's very pretty here, but mixed up his German with his spanish and called his female "investigator" very attractive.  One of the Elders also came into our room last night and said that the ground would turn into lava in 5 seconds.  For 30 minutes a dozen 18-19 year old men were scooting around on chairs from one place to another, I lost my chair and had to empty out a giant trash can and use that to travel from place to place.  Spanish is still coming strong and I can't wait to see where I'll be at by week 6. I was also assigned as District Leader this past week and feel humbled to serve such an awesome district.  I've also decided to study the book of Isaiah, and for those who haven't read it yet I highly recommend it!  It's very symbolic so it's not gonna be a quick read, I've spent a good 5-10 minutes on a verse alone!  But if you do study it with the right spirit then you can find some pretty amazing stuff in there.  I've found some pretty cool references to the book of mormon and etc during my studies of this book.  Other fun facts, during additional study, one day, I went through and read almost every account of Christ appearing unto a person (Lehi, Joseph Smith, Paul, Moses, The Nephites, and the Brother of Jared) and was able to find 6 things that were either similar in some of these accounts or in all accounts.  (Losing Strength, seeing some form of light before seeing Christ etc) And then went through and found how many of these items each account had.  Amazingly The first vision was one of only two accounts that represented all 6 of these traits, the other being Lehi's Dream.  My companion and I also went through and tried to dissect the elements of good prayer, according to the scriptures.  The thing we found to be mentioned most was the "pray always principal" along with finding a reverant environment to pray in, when possible, and pondering about your prayer before you begin your prayer, and of course waiting and listening for an answer in return.  We made a commitment to try and do those things, and I can testify that when we did we had some awesome experiences with prayer.  I love you all and hope to hear back from you soon.  I'm having an amazing time here and can't wait to get out into the field!