Week five

Hola familia y amigos!

This week was super fun, my Birthday was at the beginning of the week and the entire CCM sang Happy Birthday to me in the Comedor which was pretty funny. Learning a lot here, Spanish is starting to come along pretty well. I finished the BOM on my Birthday which is pretty cool and I'm starting to understand it in Spanish. The days are all the same here. We get up, study, teach, study, teach and go to bed. I like it, I just don't have anything to email about. We got to go proselyte on Saturday in Bogota Norte. My comp and I went with Elder Kelley from Dallas, Texas and that was so much fun. We tracted for like 4 hours and talked to a lot of people, we gave away some pass along cards and we went up this hill that was insanely steep, it was hard to breathe at the top, it took us like 10 minutes of walking straight uphill and none of us could breathe. Then we had a lesson with an investigator, Allan, from New York so we got to talk in Ingles. It was about the Temple  and we got to watch the film about the Salt Lake Temple being made and it really made me appreciate how close the Temple is to my house back home. Then we came back to the CCM and they had donuts for us, Presidente and Hermana Hansen are the best!

Then it was Sunday, Sunday's are awesome here. We had a great sacrament meeting, a great district meeting, an awesome priesthood meeting, and then it was time for lunch, but.....  The boy's  downstairs bathroom was flooding, so my companion,our friends(Elder Justice and Elder Dumas) and I spent most of lunch plunging and mopping nasty dirty toilet water from the hallway and the bathroom in our suit pants. It sounds bad but it was actually pretty fun because we're all good friends and we were laughing the whole time and we're getting our suit pants dry cleaned for free so that's a plus! Then we went on with our Sunday and watched a video about this convert named Di Francesca an Italian pastor that found a copy of the book of Mormon, but the title page was missing so he didn't know what it was. He read the entire thing and then prayed about it after reading Moroni's promise in Moroni 10.4-5 and he recieved the answer that it was true. He never lost that book, he was kicked out of the Catholic Church  for preaching from it, he brought it with him when he fought in WW1 and the Italian Ethiopian war. For years he didn't know what it was and then he finally found out and decided to be baptized around 40 years after he first found it. He only got to go to the Temple for 10 years before he died. That story really made me think about how we take the Book of Mormon and the Temple for granted. So I invite you all to read the Book of Mormon and to appreciate how close the Temple is to where you live, because other people aren't as lucky as we are.

Speaking of Temples, I got to go to the Bogota Temple again today and that was amazing. The spirit is so strong in the Temple and I'm glad I got to go one last time with my companion. I'm going to miss the Temple. This will be my last week at the CCM so the next email you get from me, I will be out in Bogota Sur!  I'm super excited. I miss all you guys and hope you're doing good. I pray for you guys and this week I prayed and fasted for Luke. I hope you're doing good bud! Thank you for all the prayers!!

Love,

Elder McBride