December 1, 2013

Week one!!!
 
 Hola! This week has been so great for me. I can feel the Lord in my life and I can feel the Spirit basically all day. My first companion´s name is Elder Woodbury. He is from Draper. He has been here for 22 months. He is such a good example to me. He Works so hard and he is teaching me the ways of the missionary. First of all, I can not understand a Word that anybody is saying...I just kind of nod when I feel like it and laugh when my companion laughs. I have been getting better at understanding people, but it is still hard. We have had some cool stories already together. Yesterday, we committed a family of 6 to baptism, and one more kid was there who wasn´t apart of the family. That kid was so touched and he was going to invite his family for the next lesson. Also yesterday, we had a great lesson with a family of 12! Well they all live together, but they aren´t all immediate family. But it was so cool. My comp. did most of the talking, but I bore my strongest testimony I had in me whenever I felt like I should. I also taught the first visión to them. When I recited Joseph Smith´s words, the Spirit was so strong! That family I think just needs one more lesson and we have them to baptism. One funny story that happened was this. We were walking down the Street when we were stopped by a drunk guy. He had been visited by missionaries before we came here. He was drunk out of his mind and he stopped us to ask us why we hadn´t visited him in awhile. We handed him a Word of Wisdom pamphlet and walked away. 5 minutes later, a taxi pulled up next to us, and the same guy got out! hahaha we were laughing and we just kept walking. In our first week in our área, we contacted almost 80 people. My companion is a great example of talking to everyone. Our área is called Tiangistenco, and it is pretty big. We do a lot of walking and taxi riding. Anyways I´m doing great so far. My misión president is awesome. He stresses exact obedience and he knows for a fact that this is the reason why our misión has the highest baptism rate in Mexico. We have to report our obedience every week to him in our weekly letters to him. Like how many days we got up at 6:30, how many days we had comp study and personal study. I have been able to teach a few góspel principles in lessons recently, and I just love teaching. Especially when the Spirit is obviously present. I only get an hour to read, write, send pictures, and write President Whitehead. So I better get to sending pictures soon. I love you all. Thank you for all the love the support. I´ll try to write more in a handwritten letter today. I can only write on Pdays but I will try my best!
 
 Elder Barton