Blacker, Chandler

¡Hola! It's been a crazy week.  We've had no free time whatsoever, which is weird bc not much super special happened, it's just the busy life of trying to optimize the time I've dedicated to serve God. I did however get to go to the temple finally.  I'm supposed to have gone 4 times by now but instead I've got a record breaking 2 temple trips in the month I've been out, both trips in the last week.  But at least the ones I missed were replaced by good things, like Elder Bednar coming. The first pic I'll send here is the pic of my Thanksgiving dinner.  Yeah.... it was pretty sad.  I got a nice sandwich, an apple, and a juice box.  I also only had 5 min to eat so I just ate the sandwich.  It had a lot of mayo on it.  I haaaaate mayo, but what choice did I have? Side note: if you've read this far please make it to the end, it gets better. We had a special devotional broadcast from Elder Ronald A Rasband this morning.  They realized how little my...

I can't believe it's already been another week.  People said time flies in the mtc but I didn't believe them until now.  All I do everyday is learn of Christ, eat, learn of Christ, play sports and have a blast with my district,  learn of Christ in spanish, eat, and learn of Christ again.  How could life get any better than that? As an mtc, we seem to be really focusing on prayer.  It's really powerful when you start praying like you are God's servant, not praying like God is your servant.  Your prayers turn from "Please bless my companion" to "Please bless me to know how I can bless my companion."  Praying with faith and intent to act really helps you be a better person and more focus on how you can be more christlike. Every morning there is cereal in the cafeteria, so every morning I eat either corn pops or fruit loops, because that's all they offer.  But I don't think they have real milk, they only have milk in boxes like it's apple...

It's been just another week at the CCM. My comp just about died on Saturday.  He got the classic Mexico mtc food poisoning and spent over 24 hours throwing up.  No bueno.  He's gotten a lot better and we're back to normal.  I did have a full day where I was stuck at the house so I did a lot of really great study and got way ahead on Spanish lessons, so that was actually a pretty good day, for me at least.  I gave Elder Wright a blessing and he's gotten much better. Elder David A Bednar came to give a devotional here.  That only happens twice a year where a member of the quorum of the twelve comes, so that was pretty special.  He let us missionaries ask a bunch of questions and give insights, and he expounded on the doctrine of everyone's comments.  It was the most spiritually prepared I've ever been for a talk, because I'm in a great place for that.  It was really amazing. I've come to really love my district, they're all like my best friends...

¡Hola amigos! (Yep, another Wylie 2 missionary learning Spanish) I just got to the Mexico MTC on Tuesday.  The first couple days here were so packed full of information that I barely knew what was going on, but I'm getting used to it here.  One of the first things I was told was that the red chicken in the cafeteria here is safe.  Which is funny because everyone I know that ate it got extremely sick, so I'm still avoiding it. Somehow the Spanish is going extremely well.  And by somehow, I mean God is blessing me with the gift of tongues.  It's been pretty amazing to see the difference with Christ as the true focus of my life.  The Spirit is unbelievably strong here sometimes. After the first couple days, my companion and I made a list of everything we needed to get done over the next couple days.  We spent every second we had trying to get all our assignments done, but we only knocked out like a quarter of the list.  For a bit we were pretty stres...