A Failure Of A Day.

Hi friends!

The title of this gmail is a little bit of a lie, and you'll find out why on Tuesday.  We're just about halfway through my time here in the CCM, time is really just flying by.

Friday

Last week I wasn't able to tell you guys too much about my day because I was writing my email in the morning, but in the afternoon my district and I went to the Mexico City Temple! Here's how it went:

Mexico City is ginormous. It was a 45 minute drive across the city to the temple, but I won't lie. While Mexico City is chaotic and gives me flashbacks to the sights and sounds of Kenya, it was kind of beautiful, and I admired all the fancy and chaotic and confusing architecture.

We had lunch at the temple at the cafeteria on the property, and I'm sorry to say, but it was some of the best food I have had so far (sorry CCM, temple food is just better). We weren't given much time to enjoy the food before going into the temple to do Baptisms, Confirmations, and Initiatories.

The Mexico City Temple is pretty cool in the fact that it looks tiny on the outside but feels gigantic on the inside. It looked beautiful, everyone was so nice, and it was amazing to be inside of a temple again.  It was a new experience doing the ordinances in Spanish, and as a fully endowed member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and I'm so glad that I could be doing temple work for those beyond the veil.

While at the temple we met a person who was born in Provo Utah, and grew up in Mexico and Kentucky (if I remember right). They were at the Mexico City Temple to get their endowments done before they start their mission, and I thought it was so cool that they chose the temple closest to their family's heritage to get endowed in.

I made a mistake in the names I chose to do proxy work for because they are actually really hard to pronounce in Spanish (Schneeberger especially), but the Lord knows what we were trying to say and the blessings will hopefully go to the right person.

The temple trip took up most of the time of my P-day, so we ended up kinda only doing the temple trip last P-day.

Saturday

Most of the rest of the week should be relatively short compared to what I wrote for Friday. Especially today because I didn't write too much in my journal about what happened today.

When we entered our classroom for our morning class we found our teacher dying in the corner because he caught a bad cold the day before. He was wearing a mask and was so out of it (he could barely translate his thoughts from Spanish to English) we felt really bad that he had to be there for work that day. At the end of our class our District Leader gave him a blessing and we wished him a speedy recovery.

Lunch had some of the best food at the CCM so far: RIBS. For the past few American meals I have been praying for BBQ sauce to go with them, and now we get a meal just dripping with it! Prayers have been answered today.

I finished doing laundry today and discovered, to my horror, one of my pant legs is falling apart! Like, what? It's only week three of my mission. Time to pull out the sewing kit and try my hand at sewing it back together.

Sunday

Finally got to play the piano for a sacrament meeting. It was so fun to play for people and to use the Prelude books my grandma gave me! The songs I was asked to play weren't too hard, but they were tweaked slightly from what I was used to in the English piano music to better accommodate the Spanish lyrics (an extra note here, one fewer note there, etc).  It was amazing being able to play the piano, but I wouldn't mind not playing next Sunday.

Sundays are special days because it is a day we can feel closer to God. I was able to feel the spirit very strong for most of the day today, and I was able to appreciate the apostle Dieter F. Uchtdorf as I read multiple of his general conference talks and had the Sunday devotional be taught by him (a recording of him, not him in person sadly). Elder Uchtdorf is an apostle of God and knows what we need to hear to find comfort and improvement in these Latter Days.  

I should call Sunday the day of Prayers, because that's what I did for most of the day. I've been trying to put more of an emphasis on God so I've been praying a lot more. It's having an effect though as I feel closer to the spirit than ever and I'm starting to see positive change in myself over how I act and how I feel about the doctrine of Christ. I'm starting to get really excited about what God has planned for all of us over the next few weeks, months, and years of our life.

Monday

First (and likely only) holiday spent at the CCM! Pioneer day was today and literally nothing was different about today compared to the other days.

My companion and I have started taking advantage of the Spanish Help Desk, which is a short class where Brother and Sister Bentley teach about grammatical principles (of our choice) in English so we can understand how the language works better. They are really short lessons that teach meaningful stuff. 

We've been learning about the Past Tenses (yes, there are two of them) Preterite and Imperfect. In English we only have one past tense, but in Spanish there are two of them, Imperfect to give context and takes place over a period of time (E.g. While I was riding my bike), and Preterite to interrupt the context, an event that happens once. (E.g. I hit the curb)

I love these classes and what I learn in them, it really does help with my Spanish. Brother Bentley also showed up during our Sunday Devotional District Review, so it was cool getting to know him a bit better.

I feel like I should also mention the TALL Embark app everyone has been using to learn spanish vocabulary and phrases. We have been tasked to spend at least 20 minutes a day and 1:45 a week using the app. I am proud to say that my daily usage varies between 1 minute a day to 1:30 a day, and weekly usage is around 3-4 hours spent on Embark.  It is a fun app to use and has helped me fill gaps in my vocabulary. Additionally, they updated the app this week to include an AI chatbot where we can practice our translating skills. I've been using that to practice using what I learn during the Spanish Help Desk sessions. 

Elder Witter, in my district, sent everyone an email containing 'The Ricciardi Letter' which is a recounting of one missionary's experience with an Elder Ricciardi. It is a very interesting (and long) letter and has some very useful advice on how to be a disciple of God and a missionary. I'm glad I was able to read it, and I hope I can be the best missionary I can be.

Final notable event for today: Our current Zone Leaders - Elder Amosa and Elder Nelson - asked me and Elder Cushing to give the lesson for next week's Sunday priesthood session. This is a little worrisome (though not too bad) EXCEPT President Hymas may be there. Now we have the pressure to develop a great Sunday lesson.

(I lied about the final notable event for today, sorry) We had green enchiladas today, and they were SO good. I'm sorry to everyone who thought I didn't like them, there are very few meals here (specifically meals with eggs. Don't eat them) I don't like, I just named my last email the name I chose because of the stomach problems we had afterwards, but I would attribute that more to our bodies adjusting to the new diet than the food actually being bad.

Tuesday

I've been continuing the trend of naming my emails of the events of Tuesday because Tuesday is just a special day.  

The weather this week so far has been gloomy and cold, and today was more gloomy and cold than ever before. This morning was a struggle because I had a hard time waking up physically and spiritually. 

We had a devotional today for all the missionaries (including the new ones who came in today) and we were all invited to write notes of the devotional for the district review afterwards. Sadly, I really struggled to take notes because I was falling asleep most of the time. I barely managed to stay awake for the devotional, but I felt so bad for not staying awake because I had a hard time paying attention to the classes earlier in the day. I hoped to make it up during the district review, but a bunch of us had to go to the bathroom and ended up wasting most of the time we had to do the review. We had 10 minutes to share our thoughts and then head home and I felt so bad for failing to give my all this day.

Today was a failure of a day, more sad things happened today than I care to write in this email, and I feel like I failed to give the time to God that I ought to have done. 

But I have not mentioned something that happened today.

During the 10 minutes we had for district review, we didn't have time to point out everything we learned, so we just mentioned the most important things we learned, the things we felt, the things we believed. Somehow. Even though we failed to make time for the Lord, and to focus on the Lord, we all learned something important about the Lord. 

Those 10 minutes as a district was SO SPIRITUALLY POWERFUL, and I learned that with the Lord, there are no 'Failures of a Day'.  Today may have been one of my favorite days of the CCM so far, because 10 minutes was able to change how I felt about the Lord, and about how I felt about the entire day. There were many great things about this, such as the food was good, I was a good goalie while playing soccer during PE time, the rain later in the day felt nice and sounded cool, the few notes I took were sincere and valuable, and I felt the spirit strongly today.

I titled the gmail 'A failure of a day', but that was only half the truth. On my own, today was a failure of a day. But with God today was the biggest success of a day.

Wednesday

Today we had a 'Helping Others' activity. Instead of roleplaying we are teaching actual people about the Gospel. We were informed of this activity yesterday and had some time to prepare a lesson for LDS youth about missionary work so we can help encourage them to become missionaries one day. Elder Cushing and I planned a short lesson that we thought was pretty solid for this task and we were excited for the activity and being able to teach a youth from Mexico about missionary work in Spanish. 

This is where the curve ball came in. When our district had our turn to be paired up with someone, we were paired up with someone unexpected. We were not paired up with a youth. We were told that we would be paired up with someone between the ages of 13 and 16, and we were with a 30 year old person. I don't fully know how old you can be to go on the mission, but I'm pretty sure 30 year old people don't go on missions. 

I'm going to introduce who we were paired up with: Meet Jonathan, the second counselor of the bishopric and elementary school English teacher. He came with his stake to the CCM to supervise the youth as they participated in this activity. And we taught him a lesson on how he should go on a mission.  

This was a crazy turn of events and Elder Cushing and I tried to salvage the situation by tweaking our message on the spot to better match his needs. I don't think we were fully successful in that, but this was also our first attempt at a helping others activity, and I was taught that I need to put more trust in God into sharing my lessons.

Elder Stinger, from Westlake Highschool left the CCM today for his mission. We didn't really talk at the CCM so I can't tell you too much about him, but I'll wish him luck either way!

A special friend of mine also had a birthday today. If you know, you know. Happy Birthday!!!

Thursday

Service project today! Same service project as last week, that is, clean the Comedor. The only difference this week is that there were more people and less jobs to do, so I ended up being the translator for the people looking to get a job and the chefs who were divvying up the jobs. 

Our district had a meeting to address problems in our district and it was great to be able to recommit to try hard to be servants of God. Part of that is to do better to clean our room, so that is one way we were able to put our new goals to action.

Friday

So far today I've just written this email. I've been writing for about an hour and a half (I should stop writing so much) and in less than an hour I will be heading to the Mexico City Temple to do Endowments.

I do want to mention that my roommates Elder Evanson and Elder Snyder are now Zone Leaders (to replace our current ones next week when they leave for the mission field) so the spiritual power in our room keeps increasing each week. I'm glad they are Zone Leaders because they have the spiritual (and physical) capability to do it.

Scripture of the Week

Helaman 5:12 "And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall."

Spanish word/phrase of the Week

Did Maria kick the ball? Yes, she kicked it. - ¿María pateó la pelota? Sí, la pateó. This sentence has an example of Past Preterite (pateó), and shortening sentences (she kicked it - la pateó). The rules for shortening sentences are kinda complicated because the object (the ball in this case) gets moved before the verb instead of staying after the verb like in English. And the perpetrator of the action (she/Maria) gets put into the conjugation of the verb. Pateó is the Past Preterite him/her/it version of the verb Patear, which means 'to kick'. Verbs are very complicated in Spanish because there are a TON of different conjugations you have to learn, as well as the exceptions to the rules.

Check out my photos! https://photos.app.goo.gl/g2QAHn4xdMnPx4JT8

Don't forget you can email me for any reason. I won't bite! mgrant@missionary.com

I'm so sorry for such a long email. I will try my hardest to shorten my emails...starting now.

Until next week!

 - Elder Grant