Week 15 - 105 Days (Triple Digits!)

Hola Everyone.

I hope everyone is doing amazing and I sure hope everyone had an amazing week. I know Mondays are probably the worst days for all of you, but Monday is such a blessing for me to be able to have the opportunity to talk to all of you. It's amazing the spirit that I am able to feel every week when I read all of your emails. Anyways, this week has been awesome - but of course, every week has its ups and downs. That's just life.

So to start off, we had an amazing lesson with the family Silva on Wednesday. It's an older lady and her son. They're so dang awesome. We taught them about prayer and then we gave them a baptismal date and they accepted. I was so excited. They're awesome investigators, but they have the hardest time going to church. And after this lesson I just knew they were going to come to church. The spirit was present and they accepted their baptismal date and everything. It was just awesome. Anyways, they didn't come to church, and it was a real bummer. We have 10 or so investigators right now and we only have one attending church. It's heart breaking because we are literally trying to do everything we can to get them to come to church.

An amazing experience I had this week was after one of our lessons, I just felt like I needed to ask my companion to give me a blessing. It was really different for me, but that night I asked him for a blessing. And it was absolutely amazing. He literally said so many of the things that were in my Patriarchal Blessing and it just gave me so much comfort. It was such an awesome tender mercy.

Anyways the Spanish is rough that is for sure. I can understand more and more every week, but it's an extremely slow process that takes a LOT of patience. This whole mission is helping me learn so much patience. It's like some lessons I can understand almost everything and then we go to another lesson and I can't understand a ting. It's tough, but it's helping me learn about patience and the Lord's timing.

A funny experience I had that I didn't mention a few weeks ago was this. So they have road blocks here quite often because the people will start protesting for who knows why and it gets crazy. So they have a bunch of road blocks all over the city to cool things down. Anyways, we made it to the church for a District Meeting and we had to walk a decent ways because the bus could only go so far. It happened to be that we weren't even having the meeting because of the road blocks. So when we got there, we had to turn around and come home. On our way back home, we were walking - and it's probably 10 miles or so (I'm not kidding). After walking forever, we finally found a bus. So we got on the bus and it was a smaller bus with the engine in the front, so there wasn't a whole lot of seats. All the seats were taken as usual, so we just had to stand. And it got so crazy, I'm not even kidding. There were literally probably 75 people on that small bus. It was insane and I thought we were going to die. The drivers here are super crazy. They go 50 miles an hour until they are 10 feet from the car in front of them and then slam on their brakes. It's an awesome experience here that is for sure. I learn something new every day.

I love all of you so much. Have an amazing week and most definitely an amazing Christmas season. Share the gospel and your testimony every chance you get. Also serve the people around you every chance you get too. I love you all so much. Keep doing it.

Elder Blake

Sorry, Mom. I forgot my camera again. But we did get the package with food and a Christmas tree. My companion and I decorated it. It's so awesome and we took a bunch of pictures. I'll remember my camera next week!