Buenas tardes everybody!
It is another beautiful day here at the CCM en México. Seriously though, everything about this place is so beautiful. The weather is hardly ever anything other than pleasant, even when it rains in the evenings it's a nice rain and we're inside for class anyway. The CCM campus is like this oasis in the middle of one of the craziest cities in the world. There is beautiful grass and trees everywhere. My favorite part is these little green parrots that are always flying around or playing in the grass.
It's hard to know what to write about because every day here is basically the same. We get up at 630 and get ready. Breakfast is at 715 and then we have personal study from 745-845. Then our first teacher comes in a usually we have Spanish class, then Book of Mormon, then we practicing teaching him. Then we have 30 more minutes of study and then we have lunch. After lunch we go to the computer lab to work with TALL (a computer program that helps us learn Spanish) and the we go back to the class room for more language study. Then we have gym and more studying before dinner and after dinner we have more classes and teach other teacher. We only have an official language class 1-2 times a day but every class feels like a language class because it's all in Spanish. But it probably helps us to learn faster.
Every lesson we teach to our "investigators" who are actually our teachers get better and better. The last few we've gone in with just a scriptures, where as before we wrote ourselves out scripts in spanish and took in all our little phrase books and such. So there is definitely improvement there.
We also had our first TRC this week. TRC is where they get actually people (from beyond the CCM fence) to come in and meet with us, and our job is just to help them feel closer to Christ. Most of them are members but some are less active or nonmembers. Our volunteer this week was Ambrosa (we thought and then our teacher told us that is not a name and we must have mis heard her), but she has been a member of the church for 3 years but her family hasn't been able to be sealed yet. We tried taking her through the first lesson but it just didn't feel right so I finally just asked if her family prays together as a family. She said that they don't. I told her that I know it can be difficult to work out everyones schedules and find the time to pray together but if she will make the effort I know her family will be blessed and it will help get them closer to their goal of being sealed together. Then my compañera shared an awesome scripture from third Nephi and we just ended with our testimonies. Even though I've never felt less confident in my abilities, it's also the only time when I've felt like being here made a difference. I hope she understood at least a little bit about what we were trying to tell her. It was so hard for us to understand her and probably just as difficult for her to understand us, but the Spirit was there and that makes all the difference.
I also got to meet with the area medical advisor this week. It seems like everything is on track for me to be trained as a mission nurse specialist. I should be doing that here in the next few weeks. (Its just a couple of hours of class on a pday). And the Area Medical Advisor and his wife are from Holladay and Papa used to be their stake president. Funny how things works out.
Well we only have three and a half weeks left here but if I can learn as much in the next few weeks as I have these past few, I might actually be able to get through a day of proselyting without breaking down into tears.
Love you all. Keep sending your prayers.
Hermana Schmidt
Oh. I forgot to relate my subject. We were talking about the chapter in the BoM where Alma the Younger meets up with the sons of Mosiah and they rejoice because they are still "brothers in the Lord." It says in that chapter that they did "labor in spirit" and it just made me think about working labor and delivery back at home. (The poor elders in my district have heard more about the birthing process than they ever planned.) Anyways. My thought was that labor is about change. That's how we know when a patient is really in labor, things change. And labor is exhausting and long and difficult but at the end you get a new life. I think that's what a labor of the spirit is. So just remember that when things are hard spiritually, thats how things change. And if you follow the Lord's path, at the end you'll get something incredible!
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