Once again, I don't have much time right now but I will be getting on again to finish a little later. First of all I am sorry you didn't get emails yesterday!! Today is Dia de Muerte in Spain so we switched P-days for the convenience of the teachers so that they could be home with their families for the Holiday. This week has been so great!! I have been making a list of things I need to talk about so if I don't finish. I will later! Anyways...remember Elder Santos!? The Portuguese elder that was my comp in the park?! Well he became really good friends with all my roommates and last week Elder Schwenke was having a hard time and asked Elder Santos to give him a blessing. He asked us all to be in the circle but Elder Santos gave the blessing. He gave it all in Portugese. The Spirit was so strong! It is crazy because we didn't understand a word he was saying but we knew that what he was saying was inspired of the Lord. I know Elder Schwenke was comforted from what Elder Santos was saying even though we didn't understand anything he said. My testimony of the priesthood grows all the time here. Last Saturday for the parque, Elder Richins (a really good friend from my district going to Barcelona) and Elder Alves (The OTHER Portugese Elder) were my companions. One of the first persons we talked to was a man sitting on a bench listening to music and playing with his dogs. At first we weren't going to talk to him because his headphones were in but we felt we needed to. I talked to him about the Book of Mormon and he didn't seem interested at all. He started walking away and all of a sudden I asked him to wait. I bore my testimony to him and he came back and all of a sudden he filled out his own referral card, told us how to tell the other missionaries to get to his house and graciously took the Book of Mormon we gave him and I also gave him a Pamphlet about the Restoration and a card so he could go to Mormon.org. and by the way....ALL THAT WAS IN SPANISH!!! Heck yeah! I am advancing more and more every day in Spanish and I am catching up fairly quickly to all the Elders here that took it in High School! The bad thing is...all I know is Gospel stuff. Last week I was trying to get around Madrid with my Companion but we didn't know how to talk to anyone about anything but the Gospel!! hahaha. I gotta get on top of that when I get out in the field! The rest of the day at the parque was good. We didn't have a whole lot of people that were interested. But that doesn't matter. As long as we are planting seeds in their hearts, they will hopefully be prepared for future missionaries. I was able to talk to quite a few people in English actually and I am a lot more comfortable teaching in English haha. But I will get there. My roommates are my new family. They truly are my brothers and the hardest part of leaving here will be leaving them. We have room prayer every night and we shift every night giving spiritual thoughts. It's one of the best parts of the whole day! One of my teachers, Hermana Martinez, is the most amazing lady ever. I was really struggling the other morning with my confidence as a missionary. She must have known. She Shared a thought at the beginning of class about when the Savior fed the multitude. The Apostles came to Him and said "This is all we have. 5 Loaves and 2 fish" But the Savior blessed it and was able to multiply what they had and feed the multitude. She said we can be likened to that. "Lord, I don't know Spanish. I don't know every Scripture. This is all I have. Please bless me that what I have can be enough to help ALL the people out there." I felt SO comforted by this! I thanked her and she said that she felt prompted all of a sudden to give that thought and it must have been for me. She reassured me that she KNOWS that I am a great missionary already. She always feels such a strong spirit with me in the room. Especially when I teach her. She says that Satan knows that I will bless tons of people and he is working so hard on me to tell me that I'm not good enough. To convince me to go home because I will never be good enough to do what I want. He's right. I never will be! But the Lord is with me. It is His work. No missionary can do this by himself. I love Him so much. And I will do everything I can to help everyone feel of that Love. I won't ever be enough to do it by myself. But I am preaching HIS Gospel. And if I preach it HIS way, I will bless the lives of countless people. :) I'm out of time. I will email a little later today :)
Mom and Dad,
I guess I wrote everything I had written down to send to everyone. Sometimes I won´t have time to try to send an email to everyone that emails me. So if you would make sure all my friends know how to get to the mission blog thing I would really like that. Sorry the pictures won´t go through. The computers at the MTC aren´t updated and the internet is really crappy. I will send all I have when I get out into the field. Everything is going good! I haven´t really gotten that homesick. It just sort of feels like the next step in my life! Sometimes I get really sick thinking about how long 2 years really is but I am so busy that I don´t think too much during the day and I´m so tired that I don´t think too much during the night haha. You asked me what I wanted for my birthday...the only thing I really would like is a letter from everyone. At least everyone in the family. If grandparents would like to I would love that and Greg too if he can. An actual letter. Not email. I can take letters with me wherever I go and read them whenever I need to. We had a member of the 70 come speak to us this week and his message was really good! One of my favorite quotes he said was "Christ is the light of the world...You are his torchbearers." I thought that was really neat!! So many spiritual things happen here! I love it!! We watched a MTC devotional Elder Holland gave in Provo and it was AWESOME!!! He is just the best!! Here are some of his quotes I loved.. "I COMMAND you to come home with at least one convert and IT BETTER BE YOU!" and "Go out there and astonish somebody!!" In the scriptures it talks all the time about missionaries and prophets astonishing the people and he talked about what is it to be astonished and that quote was just powerful! He is just a powerful man. Today we watched "On the Lord's Errand" it's a movie about President Monson! It was awesome! You guys should watch it for family home evening sometime. It's on Youtube. Also read D+C Section 80! It's a really good Missionary section! Replace the name in verse 1 with mine and then skip verse 2 and read the rest! I miss you guys and I love you! Thank you for all you have done to prepare me for this and also the way you've taught me to never give up!
Love,
Elder Marchant
