Charity Never Faileth

A pretty normal week.  I am trying to think if anything really interesting happened....  Yes!  One day a drunk man started talking to us and he said something about how I was "rubia" (which means blonde, but here they use it to describe anyone whose hair isn't black), and I agreed with him.  And then he said, "Why do you have green eyes?"  I told him that I didn't have green eyes, that it was he who had green eyes (because he did).  And then I told him that my eyes are brown.  But I may or may not have used the wrong word for brown and accidentally said that my eyes were purple.  My companion is never going to let me live that one down.  But it isn't my fault that the words for brown and purple in Spanish are just not all that different - morado (purple) and márron (brown).  Well, so they are pretty different.  But they start with the same letter at least. Anyone could confuse them, right?

We also had interviews with President this week.  We got a nice surprise when the office gave each companionship a shiny new portable DVD player.  Normally these DVD players are only given to companionships that are doing the 12-week training program, since they have to watch a lot of Preach My Gospel videos, but for some reason now they have decided that each companionship will have one.  One of the assistants, when he gave my companion our DVD player, was explaining the features to her.  He said that it plays CDs as well as DVDs, and it has a USB port so you can also look at your pictures.  And there is a remote control, so if you happen to be a few steps away from it and you want to change the song, no worries!  Then later on when another companionship of sisters received their DVD player, one sister asked my companion, "Is this so we can watch Preach My Gospel?" and my companion said, "They didn't say anything to me about Preach My Gospel.  I heard 'movies, music, and photos.'  That's what this must be for - music, movies, and photos."  It was pretty funny.  Interviews went well though.  President and Hermana Arrington are really amazing.  They love us a lot and take really good care of us.  I am very grateful for them.

On Sunday the obra misional was in charge of sacrament meeting.  And since we are the newest in the ward, Elder Klepinger and I were asked to speak.  I didn't want to give one of the normal missionary-guilt-trips-the-ward-into-accompanying-them-to-lessons-and-giving-them-references talks.  So I decided to speak on charity and love and how we can develop more charity.  I figured that at the root of everything is missionary work is whether or not we love the Lord and whether we feel His love for us and share it with others.  Hermana Lovell taught me a lot about that.  She would always say that we should just let the love of God fill us up and then we should take that love and give it away to other people.  She was really good at it too.  I, however, still have a lot of work to do in that department.  But the talk went well, I think.  I talked about how we can develop charity first by asking for it in prayer (Moroni 7:48), then by serving others (both by the things we do for them and by refraining from judging or sharing negative thoughts or feelings that we may have towards others), and then by sharing the gospel with them.

So I invite you all to read Moroni 7:45-48 (Those of you who are reading the Book of Mormon with me will be reading that as part of your scheduled reading this week anyway!) and let's work on being more full of love and charity together.

Also, keep on reading that Book of Mormon every day!

Lovelovelove you all,

Herman