We didn't get a letter from Hayden this week but instead we emailed back and forth and Gavin got a short message. Hayden was doing great but needed some encouragement and advice on making a companionship work. Hopefully, they were be able to work things out and if not, some valuable lessons were learned. Regardless, I think Hayden was really trying!
"Things are going great over here except for with my companion. You'll have to look at Dad's email for that one, I really don't want to write about him anymore. Spanish is coming slowly but surely. I can finally start to conjugate all of the verbs. I'm just so glad that its easier than English or as Uncle Bengt would say Chinese! Everything is going great at the MTC. I wake up every morning to cannons and church bells and the sounds of parrots! Not going to lie, I kinda love it! The food is getting alot better and I'm starting to enjoy everything here. I love you so much!
Excerpt from Gavin's email:
"....last night we got to teach someone really cool. Her name was Lealia and she wasn't a convert or even an investigator really. She was a law student who I think was looking for religion but just wanted to argue with us. Luckily for us she spoke fluent English and we talked for about an hour. She was interesting though, she had been raised in a small village in the Andes in Argentina, where everyone strangely enough was rastafarian and smoked weed to get closer to God, and that she had been looking for religion in her life ever since. She believes in God and Jesus Christ but told us that the Bible and Book of Mormon were testimonies of prophets not Jesus Christ and that they were the words of men not God. I tried to explain to her that the prophets were the messengers of God but she couldn't quite understand it. Maybe it was the language, maybe it was the idea, maybe it was me, but either way she couldn't grasp the concept. Poor girl asked us if God even spoke Spanish because our prophet was white. I tried to explain the concept of omniscience but I couldn't. It was difficult but I loved it to actually have an investigator who has questions and doubts, where everything went wrong was fantastic, she wasn't ready to receive the gospel and I understand that I'm here to invite people unto Christ not drag them (as entertaining as that would be). All I hope is that I planted a good seed."
"I'm really trying to think of this like my job at Companion Systems, I just have to get the worst over with first, you know baptism by fire. I really don't think I'll have anyone quite this hard and if I do well this is good preparation. Either way this is so much easier than my job! I love the people here and that investigator who tore us apart was by far my best experience. Even if I didn't get anywhere, I talked with someone about the gospel for almost an hour. We laughed, she cried, told jokes and kept a lesson going that she asked questions and had doubts about. I'm so tired of our fake investigators who simply nod, have no questions, few if any doubts and dump their girlfriends and old ways of life like it's no big deal. To have someone doubt me and ask me questions and argue was the best thing I've had in weeks."
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