Elder Bernard arrives in HoustonI am super excited to be in the same city where Dad served. What was pasadena like 30 years ago? Now it is almost en

Pues, finalmente estoy aqui en houston. I am super excited to be in the same city where Dad served. What was pasadena like 30 years ago? Now it is almost entirely spanish speaking. The mission calls it spanish land. We hardly ever use english with any of the people here. I thought I knew spanish in the MTC, boy was I mistaken, I think I may have accidently been learning Russian because what I learned in the MTC is nothing like what we have here. For the most part, my companion does most of the speaking in the lessons and I try to follow along which is sometimes very difficult. I testify in spanish alot and sometimes I teach principles. I wish I could help more but sometimes I cannot even tell what they are talking about. Its sometimes really bad because I am never well rested here and the nice droning of voices speaking another language puts me right to sleep. Some lessons that are very long are hard for me to keep my eyes open in. But it is really interesting because the gift of tongues really comes into play here. I am always trying to speak spanish but sometimes I cannot worth beans, then, during a lesson, the gift of tongues will just loosen my tongue and it is like I can say whatever I need to say and I understand everything. Like, I had one lesson with an investigator, Dora (things were going great with her and then she just dissappeared and we haven't heard from and can't find her), I understood everything and could speak fine. As soon as the lesson ended we contacted three other people and I didn't understand a word of the entire conversation. It's really frustrating because I feel like I could be contributing so much more but I don't know how to express myself. I don't know, I kinda also feel like I can express what I want to say if they will be patient and give me the time to say it but I struggle with understand what natives are saying. I can understand what my companion says cuz he is gringo and speaks really clearly but his spanish is really good. He has been out here for over a year and a half.
So for the first few days I felt like my companion and I did not click at all and we were not really like friends, just people living and doing everything together. Also, I felt like all the missionaries here in the mission were lazy. Nobody has any real direction and they don't set goals with a purpose and they don't set goals to meet them, rather just because we are told to set them. So anyways, all of our appointments on Saturday and Sunday fell through and we were not really doing anything with purpose so I spent a lot of time in prayer and thinking about it during my personal studies. In the MTC, we learned a ton about finding the elect that God has prepared. It requires faith but you have to know that God has prepared people to receive his word and let go of those investigators that are distracting you from finding the ones that are ready. We also learned that if we want to find the elect we have to be the elect. So during my personal study, I wrote up a plan about how to be the elect missionaries and how to find the elect. It included everything we needed to be doing to be 100% obedient and how to be effective in give commitments, and following through with investigators. We talked about all this stuff during comp study. My companion has only had a few baptisms. The most was one a transfer and he has had many that he did not have baptisms during the transfer. However, he is not goal oriented. We decided to change the way we do things and to set goals that we can and will meet that also stretch us. We prayed and set a goal to have four baptisms by the end of the transfer.

We then went out to work and had the most successful two days yet. We gained alot of investigators in two days and it seems like we could double or triple or goal. I hope we do. The Lord guides and there is nothing that we do of our own out here. We have to have his guidance. All the real adjustments we did to our plans were really to allow the spirit to direct us in this work and he truly does just that.

Yes my PDay is Wednesday

My address is
401 Texas St. Apt. A
South Houston, TX 77587

Love ya,
Elder Bernard