Elder Miller

Hola amigos y familia! This week was definitely a INTERESTING week........haha but really really good! We have got the best numbers we have ever gotten this week, we found lots of investigators and taught about 30 lessons, 15-20 is a good week regularly. We worked hard and I really felt impressed that we needed to make the goal of finding 2 investigators a day and we just about got it! We worked our butts off to find people who are prepared, help them start progressing and ready for baptism!! During our Zone Focus this week the Zone Leaders challenged us to get one Baptismal Date by the end of this week (which we did!) and the mission wants a WHITE CHRISTMAS this month (as in each companionship in the mission gets one baptism in the month of December)! And we are pumped to help someone enter into the waters of baptism!!! 

My Spanish is really starting to come along and I feel I'm getting close to being fluent! Sunday I was able to have full on conversations with members of the ward by myself and generally understand everything they said. The Gift of Tongues is totally real and I can feel such a huge difference in my Spanish when I have it and when I don't. Sometimes it gets frustrating but I've only been in the mission for about a month now so I'm getting better at not being too hard on myself about it. 

So this week I had a pretty interesting experience with contacting. Well long story short, my trainer completely lost his voice and we had 3 hours of street contacting planned for the rest of our night, which meant I had to make all the contacts myself haha, so as you can see it was perfect storm of circumstances for a pretty great mission story haha. So we are contacting, well I am, and EVERYONE is shutting me down left and right, then some Arabic guy speaking in broken Spanish comes up to us and starting talking to us! He was super animated and actually invited us to his Catholic Church services, then he set up his OWN appointment with us before I could even ask him! As we said goodbye, he gave us awkwardly long and strong hugs, then he grabbed my face and kissed me!!! (It's Spanish tradition to greet people-typically a man and a woman or woman and a woman-with a kiss on each cheek) It was the traditional cheek kisses, but still it's weird when to be kissed by a man.....then I accidentally tracked to an old gay man. Who actually was hitting on us, that I TOTALLY misread the situation until he slowly said "ME GUSTA LOS HOMBRES!"  And he said he liked me and my companion, once I realized what was going on I got out of that conversation SO FAST! My trainer got a good laugh out of that, because it turns out the first thing he said to us was that he was gay and he thought we were sexy....so yeah, perfect timing for my companion to lose his voice but it was still funny! 

I love this work and really feel like I'm starting to get into the swing of things. Waking up and exercising right away is a little tough, but it's really so great. Time just FLYS by out here! And I really am learning to love the members and people here. Hope all is well and hope all of you can check out the church Christmas website! ITS THE BOMB!! 

I challenge all of you to think about what the world would be like without a Savior. There are lots of people who do not have the blessings of the Gospel or even the knowledge of our Savior, Jesus Christ, I hope all of you can find one person to share your testimony of the Savior with this Christmas season and your love for the Savior will grow so much! Love you all and hope all is well! ¡Os quiero muchísimo!  

-Sinceramente,