Curtis, Alex

This week- especially the weekend-  was kinda wild. I want to skip ahead to Saturday night. While we were inviting our people to church, I got a message from one of her friends saying that her work schedule had changed and that she wouldn't be coming to church anymore, and thanked us for all the time we'd spent together as a way of kinda ending things. Later that night I asked a different guy to be honest and tell us if he was still interested, and he said no. To round it off, I made the decision to stop trying to teach one of our friends who was making more time for her kid's Catholic seminary than us. I was kinda bummed since two of them were decent at attending church, which is a HUGE sign of progress. We didn't have nearly anyone left to invite, so that was the end of church invites. Wr got to church, and things started picking up quick. I got to give a talk on the Atonement, which was fun, and then later we had two pretty cool interactions: Karen was invited to chu...

I've been in so many other people's areas this week... Let's jump in! In Monday we drove down to Madrid for zone conference with the Madrid East zone. Conference was awesome and I got to see tons of missionaries I haven't seen for a while. I even got to see Elder Madsen! He's developed so much, especially with Spanish, since I trained him. I had an awesome interview with President Eastland and got to give my departing testimony at the end of conference. I love zone conference, so it's really sad that I won't ever get to do another one... I love this mission. We learned a lot that I'm pumped to put into practice, like some ways to help people understand baptism better and progress more effectively towards it! It's going to be pretty helpful for our friends out here in Santander. After zone conference I had one of the strangest experiences of my mission.  We have the opportunity in this mission to go to one cultural event, and a couple weeks ago my boy...

^We helped a member clean up some property he bought and we had to try like 5 times to pull a tree up by its roots. Check out the vid down below. Lots of ups and downs this week! We taught an awesome Cuban father who grew up under the Marxist regime and was introduced to religion quite a bit later in life. He's come to church twice and actually asked the rare question - "why are we eating bread and drinking water?" (Last time I got to answer that, the guy got baptized) He had a ton of questions later, about why there were so many churches and how heaven and hell work. We taught him a Restoration lesson and explained the Atonement in terms of justice and mercy, sin and punishment. He was blown away, and is now reading the Book of Mormon. Viva Cuba! Lorena and Leidy (our Peruvian friends who were attending church and loving the lessons) moved back to Peru, and our other good friend Edith switched her work schedule and can't come anymore, which hurt. It's really hard...

5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: 6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers -Malachi 4:5-6 This is a pretty classic missionary scripture, and a lit prophecy about latter-day genealogical and temple work. It's also really fun that it connects to a Disney movie about Mexican skeletons! In our effort to get people to meet us and our members in non-awkward ways, we held a movie night this week and invited as many people as we could to come watch Coco with us and eat guacamole. We made some new friends and at the end I got to show my family tree to the group and explain how we as missionaries can help people connect with their ancestors. Like Miguel from the movie, I have a great-grandfather who's life changed the course of our family's history.  Alexander Robertson was the first member of his family to join the Church and move to the US. Lat...