Elder Devan Alder: One More Day in the Colombian City!!!

By one more day I mean one more P-Day! Where did the time go?? Is it 6 weeks going fast for anyone else? jajaja. Well the CCM has been great to me! Good food, temple trips once a week. An CCM president who tells it how it is and has blest me with so much knowlege! Spanish training that I don´t think I could had anywhere else! Contacting real people on the streets of Bogota! Latinos who think singing Justin Bieber is about the worst sin anyone could commit! A district that has bonded pretty good! Teaching 3 investidagors and 2 menos activios. Also the Latinos trying to trade you money from their country for one dollar (which is usally a hundred dollars in their country haha) Cooks who know you know no spanish so they speak as fast as they can but in the end are really nice because they give you the recipe for their hot chocolate! And more spiritual knowledge and such a spiritual thirst (or hunger) that I´m pretty sure it will never end because there is so much to study!

Just wanted to share an life changing experience from a couple days ago! A miracle, not for me, but I walked away from it a different person! So every two weeks another group of Latinos comes through the CCM, this will be the third and last for me! Each group has a different personality and honestly something to learn from them. This final week, my companion and I are in a room of just Latinos, it´s really helping me with my spanish! One of the elder´s in our room was Elder Ruiz. Energetic, always talking, wanted to learn english so bad, he was so energetic that he forgot some of the rules! One of the greatest guys! One night, we walked in the room to find him lying down like he was sick. We did a little companion swap so his companion could go get ready for bed. As I was writing in my journal, he jumped up, kind of shouted, and ran out the room before I could even say his name. We found him later crying holding his head on the stairs saying his head hurt really bad. We were told to go to bed and at 1 in the morning, I saw president carrying him in with some other elders, he had passed out because of the pain. It wasn´t till the next day that I found out what kind of pain. On Sunday, he seemed to be just fine until the night. Then as we were getting ready to watch our Sunday movie. We found him in our room hurled over in a pain I couldn´t describe but I will try to. He was shaking, yelling, had no control of his hands or legs. It was the most horrific thing I think I´ve seen anyone go through. The latinos keep saying that it was the work of satan. As we held him down for an hour until the medics came, all I could think was that he was such a beloved son of god and was going to be a wonderful missionary to be going through this pain. (He is fine now, headed back to his home country to get some tests and then back to the mission field) Why do I tell all of you this? For one reason. Count your many blessings and name them one by one. I have never seen anything like what my dear friend went through and it just made me so grateful for the blessings that God grants me, and from my time in the CCM, it has been a lot!

Next thing learned from the CCM! A Scripture! D&C 121:45: "Let they bowels also be full of charity towards all men, and to the household of faith, and let virture garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall they condifence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the preisthood shal distil upon they soul as the dews of heaven."

Okay you could spend hours on this one verse! Charity (I try to pray for it every day, caridad) The household of faith (come on members, why are we so hard on each other...) Virture garnishing our thoughts (probably the most important part! Without the spirit, you shall not teach) Doctrine of the preisthood (great talk by Bruce R Mckonkie) But I want to focus on the dews of heaven! If I haven´t said it already, learning a language is really tough! But here are two dews of heaven that I´ve seen. During one lesson, our teacher had us teach in english! WHAT? What a relief! Everyone in the first couple weeks always thinks a English mission would be eaiser but this changed my mind entirely. As I taught I had this new pool of words and I completely relied on myself and not the spirit, I was saying to much! The teacher noticed and told me to stop and try again three times! What a testimony builder! By small and simple things are great things brought to pass! The spirit can work through me because I won´t know a lot for a while! I am blest to be speaking Spanish! Second dew from heaven, We had our last teaching lesson yesterday (meaning my companion and I taught) after the lesson our teach evaluated us and said something like: "You know I was listening to the lesson and thought, wow, their spanish is really clear and they are asking really good questions"

I was so surprised, my spanish is clear? Really? You never see dew coming until the morning and only when you look really closely. Spanish will be hard for awhile but if I look closely, I will see the distil of dew everyday!

My testimony of this gospel is increasing by every hour! I´m kind of scared for the mission field but super excited! Especially if my first companion doesn´t know English! (I´ll just make him hot chocolate in the morning and it will be okay! If you guys have time, set aside sometime to really dive down in the scriptures! Personal and with someone! You will be amazed what the gospel can do for you and your day!

Elder Alder