Long Beach Party

HELLO TO ALL!!

Wow, it feels great to be back, I have really missed this. 

Okay so UPDATE TIME. California is awesome, I love it here. On Tuesday my flight landed and I met up with some other missionaries and the Mission President's wife, and we went to a church building to get everything set up. We had a few little interviews and orientation, and then received our companions. My companion is Elder Phillips, he's awesome! He's from Virginia and has been out about 8 months. We are serving in the Ximeno Spanish Branch in Long Beach, so I still get to speak Spanish! We share the ward with Elder Anderson and Elder Barlow, whom we also live with. They're great guys. I'm really happy and really excited to be here, this is going to be so much fun. 

I will be honest, the first day here was pretty hard for me. I was missing Ecuador and my mission President and the missionaries and the people I was teaching and I couldn't help but compare everything I was experiencing here to the experiences I had had in Ecuador. I was laying in my bed thinking and a clear thought came to me. It was "You had those experiences and they were great and special. You're here now, so use those experiences to learn, grow, and be better. Create those same memories here."  That brought me a lot of peace, I felt as though Heavenly Father was thanking me for what I had done in Ecuador and that He is now asking me to do the same here in California. I'm excited to give my all. 

So as far as the work goes, it's very different from what I was doing in Ecuador. We spend a lot of time on Facebook trying to find Latinos that live in Long Beach, and when we find one, we 'friend' them and message them and try to start a gospel conversation. It's hard haha. We also have been calling all the members and leaders of the branch to get to know them and figure out how we can best help. Elder Phillips and I are both new to this area, so we don't know anyone. It's also a new area, so there aren't any people that were previously being taught. We're getting some traction going though so were hoping to see some progress this week. 

We went to the church the other day to use wifi for a zone Zoom meeting and I found a live mouse in the trashcan. It was gross. We dumped it outside, I hope it didn't get back in. 

The power went out the other day when I was trying to make cornbread so I couldn't use the oven and had to put the batter in the fridge and wait till the next day. We got our cornbread though. 

I have decided to do a much more in depth study of the missionary training manual, Preach My Gospel. I was reading the other day and read a line that simply said, "Honor Christ's name by your actions."  I love this. It's easy to be casual sometimes in our worship or in keeping the commandments, but if we remember Christ in all that we do, we are not going to be casual, we will do our very best. 

That's all I got this week! I love and miss you all! 

Elder Spangler