Monday, December 2, 2013

DECEMBER 2, 2013


Well first off I´m just freezing hahahh. It´s so cold here. But let´s see, where to start.. My comp... hahaha he´s sick. He doesn´t speak English so at times it´s just a struggle because I´ll be way tired and not wanna speak Spanish and he can´t speak English and so I´ll mess with him and speak Catalan because he doesn´t know it.  He speaks Portuguese and Spanish so I am trying to learn that for fun.  But hmm… our ward isn´t even half as good as our old one but hey es lo que hay. It´s still really good. I have a new girlfriend though.. She´s 5 years old and just loves me hahahah her name is Andrea.  She comes from the best family in our ward. Hmmm my area is sooo far away. I may have been in France yesterday... jealous? It´s a lot prettier than Hospitalet but I miss my home ward…a lot. A lot of Spaniards do live here but now there are tons of people from Honduras hahaha.  All the people from my home ward wrote me this week.  They told me they are all coming to visit me on Christmas Eve!!!  It is like a three hour drive for them…I love them so much.  They said they are bringing gifts and my little girls sent me a letter…I almost cried.  No Christmas here in Girona but back in Hospitalet where they are from South America, they do celebrate Christmas.

I am near a Dominos and a kabob place….nothing else hahahah. I think the food is even worse here. Funny thing is I came from the dense city where I could walk it in 20 minutes and now I have to take a train an hour and a half to get anywhere hahaha.  We contact in the street but we don´t live in our area. There are a lot of people in the city but probably not even half as much as were in Hospitalet.  We do not get fed here at all ... AWFUL!  Today we are gonna play basketball.   We’ve got a Hermana that´s like 6’ 2” and plays college bball and her boyfriend who is serving a mission will be playing at BYU he´s 6’ 11”!

Well first off the change here has been really hard but I think I´m starting to get back into the swing of things. I never thought I would grow to love people the way I have. I can´t believe how hard it was to leave people that I only knew for three months, but now I could never forget them. That ties into what I have learned this week… I feel I´ve really come to learn, or better understand, the true love of Christ. There are all these people that I barely even know or am just starting to get to know and I hear their situation and I just feel this true sadness within, I truly feel their pain, I truly want to help them. The thing is sometimes I just don´t know how.  You see a sad older lady who is telling you her life story through tears and you just want to hug her but can´t... so you resort to the only thing that you can do and is share the comfort that this gospel brings. It has truly amazed me the way that sharing a simple scripture to someone like that just changes the entire atmosphere of the situation. All the sudden you feel this love, this warmth and their tears turn from sadness to tears of joy because of a feeling they can´t describe, but we know to be the Spirit. Just something I´ve learned this week.

This was truly a miracle to me. So we went to our ramas noche de familias and there was this lady there, pretty old, that everyone said comes super often but isn´t a member. So anyway, we decided to go around a circle and tell what we were grateful for and when it got to her she said, “no skip me,” but we all insisted she go… so she just said that she truly wasn´t grateful for anything, that her family had abandoned her, she felt so alone, no one loved her, that she was honestly just waiting to die. So after she said that everyone just sat there and said nothing so after some seconds of silence I just said Hermana I want you to know that I´m grateful for you, that you´re still alive, and that you´re with us right now. Just know that I love you and that our Heavenly Father loves you more than you could ever imagine. And that was basically it no one said anything more and we just carried on. So on Sunday we walk into the chapel and first person I see sitting in the back is her, all alone. So I go over to her and say hello and all she did was say Elder, thank you so much. And that was all. For some reason that´s just a miracle to me and I just felt I don´t know…different. 

Anyway everything is going super duper great up here. So I hope everyone is doing well! I love you all!

Elder Mateos



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