Week 7

As promised, here are the pictures I forgot to send last week. Again I have to send them in chunks because the way my email works...

Anywho, what´s the mission been like the last week -- my second week in Chile? WILD!!!! Full of highs and lows, happiness and frustration. My first P-Day last week in Temuco was nuts. I spent about 2 hours in the street markets but didn´t buy anything because I had no clue how to talk to the vendors haha. But then we went to the mall and ran into one of the Hermanas from my district at the MTC. 

My lessons have been going so-so, in the sense that I don´t really get to play much of a role in all of them. However, this week came with some really neat experiences like my first baptismal challenge and next week will be my first baptism (sort of)... I asked her to be baptized but my companion did most of the teaching before I got here so he will be the one doing the actual baptism. And plus, I want my first baptism to be an investigator that I started from square one and work with them up to baptism, so this one is just kind of an appetizer.

My spanish is still pretty hit and miss. I have moments where I went on splits with the zone leader and he had me teach half of the first lesson all on my own and to my own disbelief I did a pretty good job... Then there are days where I can´t understand or speak anything at all. Which is extremely frustrating to me. I want so badly to be a missionary and in fact my mission president came to our branch conference and I had a conversation (in Spanish somehow) with his wife about how irritating it is to have this desire but not the ability to turn my desire into action in my lessons and life as a missionary. It´s hard, and granted I´m pretty hard on myself to achieve goals that are further than my capabilities. I have been complimented numerous times (by members, other missionaries, and even my mission president yesterday) on where my abilities are at this point in my mission but perspective is one thing that I lack. Which is why the past few days I have been studying the characters of Christ, in particular PATIENCE.

As I said, I´m absolutely in love with this work and can´t wait for my abilities to meet up with this passion.

Elder Mundell