Elder Khristian Sorensen: WEEK 5 Christmas in August!

Hey everyone! How are you all doing?

I have had a pretty good week 5 and now we are on our last week here at the CCM! This last week went by very fast and there was not a whole lot that went on. We have studied a lot this week to get ready for Ecuador. I think everyone is starting to get stressed that it is about time to go to Ecuador. Our Spanish is all getting a lot better and it has been nice to see all the progress that we have made. Elder Kwak and I have gotten pretty good at teaching the lessons. It is very difficult however because they only give us 15 minutes to teach each day, and that is not enough time to teach. It seems like as soon as we answer any questions that they have, it is time to close. It is a pretty cool feeling though to understand just about 100% of what they are saying in a completely different language. For me it is a lot easier to understand what they are saying than for me to talk, but I am progressing every week. Elder Kwak is really good at speaking Spanish he just does not understand a lot of it, so I act as a translator for him most of the time.

We had our Christmas in August last Tuesday night and it was a lot of fun! We all bought each other presents and then acted out the birth of Jesus. We had a lot of fun with it and got into some pretty good costumes to act it out. It was nice to just take some time off studying and just have some fun. We also had a great devotional that night.

There was a pretty cool answer to my prayers this last week. An Elder in our district has been having a hard time learning Spanish and a tough time just being here. Our teachers were starting to realize that he really needed help. This was last Wednesday. I had a meeting with our 2 teachers and we decided that we would pray that night and tomorrow we would talk about what we should do. That night I prayed that he would receive something that would help him feel the love and support back home. Well the next day we went to gym and before we go to Gym we check the mailbox everyday. I do not know why we check it before gym because never once has there ever been mail before gym. Well this time there was 3 pieces of paper which usually mean there is a package for somebody. Well all 3 of these were for the Elder, from his parents. I think the whole district was more happy for him then he actually was, but since then he has really brightened up and seems to be having a lot more fun here. It was a really cool experience to see and definitely strengthened my testimony.

Not much really went on this week, we lost our 2nd set of Spanish Elders from our apartment, but they were nowhere as good as the first ones were. We are now in our last week to get ready to go to Ecuador. I don´t know what time we will be leaving yet, we receive our flight plans on Thursday. If we leave on Monday then we will be able to write on Saturday night. If we leave Tuesday then we get to write on Monday night.

I hope everyone has a great week and look forward to hearing from you guys next week!

Elder Sorensen

Khristian's GOOD- BETTER- BEST for the week...

GOOD= Christmas in August

BETTER= The week went by super fast!

BEST= When I prayed for inspiration and the Elder got his packages from home.