Recognizing the Spirit

Yeah, so my companion is Elder Martinez. He is a convert of 1 year and 10 months, and his whole family recently joined the church. He is 25 years old, was a PE teacher before the mission, and is really good at everything sports. He is also really humble, and wants to be an amazing missionary, and is definitely becoming one! He has no fear, and talks to everyone, and we always set baptismal dates for our investigators in the first lesson, and he does it without a problem! It's so cool! He also loves to joke around, and learn English. He asks me how to say things all the time, and also says "What's up man?" a lot, because he's still working on his vocabulary! I am also reducing his ties for him, and they look pretty great! I'm getting much better at sewing, and I'm pretty confident now.

My pensionista's family is super cool! They have 3 children and one of them reminds me of Lydia a lot! It's really cool! Our pensionista is studying English, and teaches in an elementary school at the same time, which is crazy. Her husband teaches English at a college, but it's British English, but he knows it really well!

We had three baptisms on Saturday, of a single mom with her two kids, and the son asked me to baptize him, which was super cool! They are super intelligent and learned everything super well and quickly! I'm always humbled by the displays of faith that changes lives. I was thinking this week about being born in the covenant. It's something that I value a lot, but also, it sometimes makes it difficult to learn to recognize the spirit, because it's something I've always felt. We always teach in Galatians 5:22-23 that "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." I finally realized that that's what I feel! A lot! It just seems to be easier to recognize the lack of the spirit than the presence of the spirit. Another thing that I've been working on is following the promptings of the spirit, which is very important to receiving more promptings. Sometimes we have thoughts about good deeds we could do, and then we justify not doing it. This prevents us from feeling the promptings in the future. This is what I'm applying right now, and it's amazing to see the results!

I love you all very much!

Dallin