no es difithil querreros 25 Aug 2010

It was a cousin that served here! Now i even know the name and can pretend we were best buds, and maybe someday we can even become best buds. Thanks Matt. When i met Elder Paya he looked at the tag and asked if they called me Superman too. I had no idea what he was talking about, but he was a general authority, so i pulled the good old smile and nod. Luckily he explained it after, but it was definitely ironic because i do get Clark Kent a lot. Not due to any work ethic or overachieveablity (from now on that is a real word) but rather to the glasses and perfectly sculpted wave in my hair that is now a month and 3 days old (my birthday present to myself- i call it my onda). I have had a couple random people bring it up but the one of greatest note is Pepi (Josepha) Maneu. She is in the ward i am serving in right now and we see her everyday because she works at the temple hostal. She is actually our adoptive spanish mother. We even got to be there for the baptism of her neice, Paula. Awesome connection.

The proclamations Susan put together sound soo good. Everyone here loves Susan. My companions love her for the packages. The members love her for the picture book which has turned out to be as good as gold. The investigators love her for the youtube video she made of my call- i still have no idea how they find it. Speaking of wierd stuff found on youtube, the ward has been having a good time with the tyedye and the knitting on mom's show which they tracked down on youtube. Youtube!

Finally! Business out of the way and we can get on to the good stuff.

Guess what? The church is true! My whole mission i have always loved to put that to the test and do what i call truth detectors. Today i had just one of those moments. Week 5 of every transfer is Madrid soccer week after we get out of the temple. All of the mission mormonaries from madrid show up. While we were waiting for the crowds to gather we snook the water battles of several elders away and set them up on top of the goal. We then took turns trying to hit them. I have holes in both my shoes so luckily i had an excuse for sucking because i was horrible. I didnt even come close. Also fortunate is that we were all extremely united in our terribleness. Then i did the test. The test has yet to fail. It really is incredible. I put the ball down from the furthest away spot attempted and procclaimed the test, "if i get this the church is true" and took the shot. The ball flew through the air like a torpedo from heaven and completely destroyed the small bottle in the middle and left the poor bewildered elder amazed and thirsty for the rest of the day. This has worked with a football from the far side of the gym, a rock with a skinny tree in the distance, the united states beating spain in soccer last year, and countless other moments. There it is. Nobody can say my testimony is not built on a sure foundation.

Oh my, running out of time.

Yesterday was a blast at our basketball activity. Every week we get like 25 poeple and there are never more than 5 that are members. Yesterday was special because a ton of new people showed up and we have appointments with all of them for later this week. The best part though was with a guy who has been coming since the beginning. He is a paraguayan man that used to play professionally in bolivia until he hurt his knee so now he is limited to the spotlights of the Madrid 6th ward chapel lights. He is an amazing guy but has never accepted meeting with us because he is afraid to try something different then the catholicism he grew up with. Luckily, the Lord let him smash his finger at work that morning so he asked us if we had tape to tape it up for him. We took him to our little first aid kit across temple square in the security office and took care of him. While there he saw the camera screens the security look at and asked why the security was so good. We then go to explain what the temple means to us. Seems like that got him thinkind. Towards the end of the night we told everyone that there was time for one more game because we had to be getting home. He was sitting out and came over to sit by me. He asked why we have such a strict schedule. Then he asked what we do all day. Then he asked how we make a living out here. Then he asked why we come. I gave him my whole story. Afterwards he got a hint of why we look people in the eye when we tell them it is true. He thought about it for a bit. Then after a few seconds of silence he turned and said, "i want a book of mormon." There are so many incredible people in that activity. So fun to get them asking questions. Sadly, the bishop of another ward is trying to shut it down because there are too many non-members.... hmm. No worries, good intentions are easy to work with.

That does it for today.

I love everything about my life,

Especially y'all,

Elder Sky

Period. 18 Aug 2010

Alright, i cant hold it in anymore, we had one of the coolest things happen yesterday. No one can ever tell me that my incapacity to control the volume of my voice has never done me any good. We contacted a family in the park the other day and they were really cool.. We gave them the Elder Carrleton experience (Carr + Middleton = Carrleton) and they loved it. They asked if we would be in the area the next day so they could see us so we agreed on meeting them in the park. Sadly, the weather was bad so they didnt show. Luckily, this is the Lord's work so something even cooler happened. We were walking through the park, a little bummed that they didnt show and we saw a group of kids playing on the play ground in the distance. About seven 12 year old kids. Like always, the kids yelled at us when they saw us. Like always, i yelled back. Then they said a couple of english words they know. Then i said a couple of english words that i remember. They were a little shocked because what i said sounded way cooler than what they said so they decided to come running over to ask what was said. We gave them a little run down on the lingo and there was one that spoke really well, a couple that spoke okay, but the rest were terrible. Then we started asking them about their english classes and why they hadn't learned anything. They said that they didnt like it and they didnt care. I told them that was stupid. Then we spent a good while talking about college and working hard. It was wierd and a little sad. You could tell that none of these kids had ever had anyone motivate them to be better, much less tell them that they could do it. They soaked it up and asked tons of questions about it. Of course they are still kids and would try to crack jokes or would say stupid stuff, and of course we would one up them and maintain the obvious dominance and forced himility upon them. They loved it. As we were leaving the ring leader, kind of the alpha-kid, came up to apologize for some of the dumb stuff his friends said. He was actually the one who spoke really good english and talked the most about wanting to go to the university. We started talking and he was the most incredible kid i have ever met in spain. Elder Melocoton (as i call him) caught some of what we were talking about and immediately was amazing and kept the other kids entertained by asking them to ask him any question about the mormons. While he had those ones on the side i asked Angel, this amazing kid, what he wanted to do in his life. He said he wanted to go to Harvard. I said, "do it" and a light just came on inside of him. He made an excuse about not knowing if he could pay for it and i said to not think one second about. Just work hard and do it. Then he looked at me for a second and out of nowhere just said, "i believe in God." He said that he just felt like there was something there. Then i got to tell him what i had felt and how. Even got to tell him about the Book of Mormon. He just looked excited to hear it all. I told him we would give him one and that he could feel it too and he said that he would love to have what we had. Then he hit me with a shot to the heart. Must have been one of the heart melting bullets because it worked. He said that he had actually walked on temple grounds before. He was alone and he didnt know why he wanted to go look at it, he just really felt like he wanted to. He said that as soon as he set foot on the square he felt something he had never felt before. Something very peaceful. He just felt good. We exchanged some numbers and some testimony and we will be seeing him later. Apparently Elder M had a good time with the other kids too because they called us that night to ask if we could show them around and give them a tour. It was so fun herding six 12 year olds all around the church.

Incredible experiences every moment of everyday, but so little time to even scrape the surface.

Oh well, take your scrapings for now.

Love you,

Elder Sky

my dear mamacita 11 Aug 2010

I am sitting here beginning one of the most rushed emails ever, and there is an awesome elder sitting behind my and he just saw the title. He asked, "doesnt that have certain conotations?" I just looked at him and said, "you better believe it."

I would like to make a quick interjection to rhett- I stand corrected. Sharks are definitely not mammals. I tried to come up with some tricky cover up to protect the few remains of my shattered pride, you know, something like the fact that i was referring more to the aggresive mother sharks: mama maulers, or mamauls, but there is not time for such ticky tacky work. I will let you have this one. Twoshay (i didnt know how to spell that so i purposefully spelled it as horribly as i could).

I think the talk on the 19th sounds great. I was hoping to be able to add in something interesting and i think the jet lag will be the perfect spice. I remember what it did to me when i got here, i cant wait to see what it does when i am in front of a couple hundred people. I accept your challenge.

So we have become a bit infamous in the mission for being the zone that always has awesome activities every transfer. Today we topped it all. We planned on having a zone dodgeball day, but after thinking it over we decided to make it our zone vs. all the other madrid zones. It went down gloriously, and we are the dominant zone. I was pretty dominant for the first 5 minutes. Well, that is until a stray ball somehow found its way out of my hand and into a sister's face. No harm done, but i didnt feel too good about that one. After a while we switched it up and started trying out new teams since we had about 50 missionaries there. We did Utah vs. everyone else, people who use the lisp vs. poeple who dont, new missionaries vs. old ones, stuff like that. It was fun and it helped some of the bilbao and malaga people who have been having a hard time with the change get to know some of the mission. President even came and he would even cheer after i acted out an extremely overdramatic death after getting hit by a ball.

Sorry, time is super short, all the locutorios were closed until like 20 minutes ago. Let me hurry and get something worthwhile in.

We have been teaching a lot of really young people lately, So much of our efforts have been focused on youngins. I love teaching people that are younger than me. The lessons just stop being lessons. I love just talking with them and sharing what i have felt and helping them feel it. We do that with everyone but they accept it alot better. We have been teaching a kid who has been staying here with his cousins for the summer. He is from new york and is a total gangsta. We have had some awesome lessons and he has been reading and one time when he prayed he felt something incredible. He was worried with how his parents would accept it but this week he got a call saying that the missionaries talked to his parents and they are being taught and really like it. There are no such things as coincidences (you better believe that is sincere because i dont even know how to spell that word).

Sorry that is brief, but we gotta run to a lesson.

Health is great, life is happy, love is overflowing,

Elder Sky

hola mamacita 4 Aug 2010

So the flight plans are in... oh my gosh, so wierd. I am not gonna lie, I am way super excited to see you all, but i am not happy at all that this is ending. Oh well, i will just take my frustrations out on Jason. All better.

We just got back from the museum of natural science. It was cool. We went for the dinosaurs and there were no dinosaurs. The entance was just roped off and i was like, "what the heck?" Under construction, so they say. It cost us 5 euros. The cool stuff i saw added up to about 4.10. The dinosaurs would have made the difference. It was like the spanish version of the
florida sea world trip all over again. Just waiting to see those sharks. All day seeing other sub par stuff just thinking about how cool those sharks are gonna be. Then it happened. Right before getting to the sharks. The beginning of Jason's acrobatic career begins with him careening off a bar onto his chin. The blood was cool, but it was not the resuflt of giant watery mammals tearing through the flesh of other helpless fish.

Wow, that was a forgotten piece of trauma that just surfaced. Sorry you had to experience that. Looks like another frustration i will have to take out on Jason when he gets here.

The baptism of Paula was incredible. Such an amazing program and turnout. She had a really hard day but came through like a champ. She said when she woke up that morning she almost called us to say she couldnt do it because she was attacked by feelings of being unprepared. She talked herself through that and went for a walk. While walking she got the thought to stop by the train station and catch a train to take her as far away as she could possibly get. Luckily, she ignored that one too. Then she got home and started to feel very very sick. She couldnt take it any more and just fell to her knees. She said she couldnt do anything else in that moment but pray. She just told God that she was not good enough and in no way ready, but that
she would always follow Him. She said that she would trust Him and leave her life in His hands. When she was baptized she understood why. I think she felt the Hands.

She is in the picture. The rest are her family and friends of the ward.

Life is good. Time is short. Love is abundant. Jason is in for it.

Just kidding,

but seriously.

Love,

Elder Sky
185 lbs. everyone says i look skinny... well, just the latina mamas.