Monday, February 1, 2016

Jacob - November 23, 2015


This week has been pretty good. It kind of sucked when I thought I knew Spanish, but after this week I am terrible. My sentences are not structured correctly, but fortunately people can still manage to understand what I am trying to say. I pretty much just say I don't speak very good Spanish with almost every lesson and my listening is even worse. It takes me so long to try and decipher what people are saying to me. I know I'll get it within a few weeks, but right now it's pretty tough. I'm not worried too much about it though. I'll figure it out eventually.
I do have a sweet trainer though. His name is Elder Galleguillos and is from New York, but his parents are Chilean. He speaks fluent Spanish and has helped me out quite a bit this first week. I'll try and send you a picture of him later today though. I'm at a Library right now and didn't take any pictures yet this week. I will later today.
To answer some of your questions Lexie.. I do have a car! Haha! It is so nice to get from place to place in 10 min or less. But on top of that we have iPad's too! We are definitely a blessed mission. I think the iPad's are more helpful than the cars actually. We have an area book app on them which makes planning and finding people to teach so much easier. We have a downloaded record of everyone in the area from Potential Investigators, Progressing Investigators, Not interested and also not keeping commitments. Oh also the members have records to for less-actives, new converts and also active members. With each person we can just click on their name and their address, phone and back ground info pops up along with reported lessons in the past. Super useful. Yesterday I planned for today and it only took like 10-15 minutes to find people close to each other and have promising back ground info.
Lessons were pretty good this week. We didn't have any set appointments, well we did, but they were cancelled. However that didn't stop us from teaching people that we found. We just used our app found people, knocked and taught a quick lesson. I usually try to bear my testimony at the end or invite them to keep a commitment. So far it has been pretty good and little by little I pick up on the Spanish. I don't know if I'd say we're killing it, but for a first week it was really good. One thing that I have tried to remember is our Purpose, to invite others to come to Christ. One day I remember we didn't really teach anyone, but I looked back and though of my purpose and I still felt like we had a good day, despite our lack of teaching because we were able to help maybe one person come nearer to Him. I think that's the attitude I'm going to try and have on my mission. That numbers don't matter and I know I have heard that before, but being on a mission I can see the impact that counting numbers could have. I'm glad we don't do that here. Granted we keep track of our goals and stuff, but I don't think the President is too worried about each Missionary having a Baptism every week or anything like that.
I'll probably check my email again later today. I hope this answered most of your questions and I can't wait to hear back from you two. Take care and have a happy Thanksgiving.


Con Amor, Elder Baer


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