You say goodbye and I say hello. Hello. Hello.

I think this will be my last email from La Ciudad de México. Nothing crazy happened this week. No earthquakes, kidnappings, or really hot peppers. However this past week I was made District Leader. That means I get to pick who prays and what song we sing. No I'm kidding I've got to go to Sunday meetings and make sure that everyone knows what they are doing. I also have to teach quite a bit and some other stuff but I like it. I like having the opportunity to serve my district.

I got to go to the temple this week which was pretty cool. Going through a session in Spanish is interesting but I'm surprised by how much I actually know. Every time we go there, which has only been twice, we get to see some of the city. The size of the city blows my mind. It is incredibly huge. It makes me excited to get out to the jungles of El Salvador, which will be coming up here real soon. I still don't know what mission I'm going to for sure yet. I am pretty sure it will be the El Salvador Santa Ana mission though.

Teaching is tough. The Spanish isn't the hard part either. It's hard, but not the hardest. The hard part is being able to recognize the spirit and discerning the needs of the investigator and then teaching to those needs. Elder Thorpe and I have gotten much better at it then we were at the beginning. It may have something to do with the fact that the people we teach are our classmates and teachers. This past Wednesday we had something called TRC. It's where you teach volunteers from around the MTC. The first TRC we ever had we taught a teacher here. That was probably the most depressing part of my mission so far, which is a good thing because it wasn't really that bad. This past TRC we taught a girl named Samanta from La Ciudad. Elder Thorpe and I didn't have a clue what we were going to teach so we went in trusting that the Lord would tell us what to teach. It was the best lesson we've had. I felt like we taught with the power and authority that is so often mentioned in the scriptures. It was awesome. After the lesson we had a discussion about Orgullo (Pride). It was really good. We didn't talk about it in the traditional sense. We talked about how pride is a sin of comparison and a sin of not trusting in the Lord enough. I think I struggle with that because for all my high school years I trusted on myself. If I wasn't going to do it it wasn't going to get done. Now I need to trust on the Lord, but entre dicho y hecho hay gran trecho. Once I learn how to do that more fully it will be a lot easier to teach and it will be a lot more effective because I don't know the needs of the investigator but the Lord knows them perfectly. We also talked about how we need to be grateful for our weaknesses and inadequacies. See Ether 12:27. I don't know if I came up with this or it came to me through revelation but it was probably a little of the former and a lot of the latter.  Anyways here it is. If necessity is the mother of invention then Inadequacy is the mother of Improvement. Think about why people practice sports, music, art, or anything. It's because they want to get better at it because they feel inadequate at it. We need to be thankful for our inadequacies but we cannot be content with them. We cannot afford to wallow in the depths of mediocrity. If we trust in the Lord and work hard to become better the Lord will use our weaknesses, our debilidades, to make us stronger. Check out 2 Corinthians 12 and also 2 Nephi 4:17-35 for some more good scriptures on this topic.

Thanks for reading and keep up the emails. I love hearing from everybody. Have a great week. Next time you'll hear from me I'll be in El Salvador.

-Elder Rowberry

¡Levantaos del polvo, hijos mios, y sed hombres!