Hermana Schmidt en México: Week 4: He Knows My Name ~ August 21, 2015

Hola everybody,

Its been another beautiful week here at the CCM. Time is starting to move pretty fast. We've been here longer than almost anybody else. That is so crazy to me.

Sorry for no email last week. I was sending pictures to my mom and then gmail locked me out of my email for sending so many emails to one person. So I was really flustered and eventually got back in but it threw off my whole emailing. The coolest thing about last week is that my companion and I got to go on a driving tour of México city! Two weeks ago we were supposed to go to the office of immigration to get our residency approved, but because we got transferred from zone 9 to zone 6 they forgot to tell us. We ended up having to go last week, just my companion and I. But afterwards our sweet driver took the long way home and stopped at six or seven different monuments in México City and took our pictures at every one! It was so incredible.

Another cool experience was when we were teaching in TRC (which is when they have real people from the outside world, usually members, come and let us practice teaching on them.) We were teaching this really nice lady named Mary who has been a member for 9 years but her husband has no interest in joining the church. My companion and I were trying to teach her and it was not going very well. Both of us were having a hard time speaking and we both totally forgot the scripture we planned on using (and because our scriptures are in spanish we cant just look things up) and we couldn't think of another one, so finally I just started asking her questions and then I bore my testimony to her at the end and it was so special. I spoke for like 5 straight minutes in Spanish, it was awesome.

One really special experience we had this week is that we had an elder in our district who was really struggling with spanish. So as a district we decided that we were going to fast for him. We took turns fasting as companionships, even our teachers participated and then this elder and his companion were the last two who fasted. The progress he has made in his spanish is seriously a miracle. He has learned more in the past 12 days than I learned in my first 3 weeks here. It has been so incredible to see.

Today we had the opportunity to go to the México City Templo open house. It was so beautiful! I really wish it had been open for ordinances but the open house was beautiful and the have some really special artwork which we got to see.

There has been a lot of excitement around the CCM because Elder Christoffersen is coming next week! He'll be here on Wednesday and we are very excited.

I was pretty overwhelmed with Spanish last week and this week were learning a lot of different ways to conjugate verbs and they were all mixing together in my head and I was getting pretty frustrated. Then on Tuesday night we had a devotional and it was Elder Bednar talking about the Character of Christ. Towards the end of the talk he is teaching about how we first have to demonstrate and then we receive a witness. He gave the example of Éter 3 (I can't remember what that is in English, It's so weird) and the Brother of Jared and how the Lord touched the stones one by one. He said it was necessary that the stones be touched one by one because the first one was a trial of his faith but by the 8th or 9th it wasn't a matter of faith anymore because he had tried his faith so many times that he knew that the Lord would light the stone. And eventually so much of his faith became knowledge that was how Brother of Jared was able to see Christ. I thought about my own life and how I have seen the hand of God in my life so many times and experienced the power of the atonement, that I can tell an investigator that God cares about them and the they can be healed through the Atonement and KNOW that it is true. Because for me it's not a matter of faith anymore. It's something I know.

I love you all!

Hermana Schmidt