Happy Mothers Day

Happy Mothers Day!

First of all: I have the best mother and grandmother in the world and I hope you guys had the greatest mothers day ever yesterday! I hope you knowing that I was thinking about you. (to anyone else reading this, you should be super jealous, they really are the best).

Second of all: It was so amazing to skype with all of you yesterday! You guys all look like you´re doing well and are happy. I´m so sorry the time was short and that I could only talk to each of you for a few minutes and that goodbyes were rushed but please know that I love you so much and skyping with you was seriously the highlight of my mission thus far...I have only been out 8 weeks so it doesn´t have much competition but details details.

So I briefly mentioned the church here in Spain a little bit in my last email so here is just a little more background: There are three wards here in Valencia which is awesome! However, even though each ward has enough members to classify it as a ward it seems as though half of them are inactive so sacrament services are actually pretty small. A third of the ward (keep in mind when I use fractions I am TOTALLY guessing) is African, mostly Nigerian (can I just say that Spanish with a Nigerian accent is the coolest thing ever?). There aren´t very many youth in the ward but it is so cool to see how most of them have a goal to serve the mission and they love to help us out with citas (appointments). So last week was fast sunday right? Well the four of us missionaries that are assigned to our ward (there are four to each of the three wards) bore our testimonies. After the meeting a member of the bishopric asked me to give a talk this sunday. So I gave a talk yesterday, they made sure I knew that it was a talk not a testimony and that it should be over ten minutes about missionary work. I spoke for like twelve minutes! I can´t take any credit for that though, I had so little time to prepare (all of you returned missionaries are probably rolling your eyes now) and I just prayed that the spirit could be there. I was really nervous because there are always so many kids running around and screaming and people are talking and so I didn´t know how I could bring the spirit. But my companion later told me that when I started speaking the whole room just went quiet. It was such an incredible experience and I had about twenty people come up to me after and tell me how strong the spirit was. As I said, I can´t take any of the credit for that, I was just so grateful that God gave me the gift of tongues and answered my prayer for the presence of the Spirit to be there.

So this week we had each day filled with appointments. Unfortunately, most of them don't end up happening and people don't end up being home. I can see why people talk about missions being a bit discouraging at times but my companion and I have been very blessed. There have been several days this week that we had our days completely full and with only an hour to go before we had to head back to that apartment we hadn't had one lesson. I'll be honest, there were a couple of those days when I had to have a pray in my heart to have a good attitude even though my feet were hurting, I was hungry, and I felt like our day had been a complete waste besides a couple of pass-along cards we had handed out on our way to appointments but each of those days we were able to teach at least one lesson before we headed back. Hermana Shaffer and I would go back to the apartment with smiles on our faces and talk about how happy we were. This same experience happened so many times this week and looking back on it I am so grateful. I'm grateful that God pushed us. He tested us and our diligence with hard days but, as long as we gave the day everything we had, we always went back to the piso with smiles and a great experience.

A couple of random things before I get off:

We have two new investigators that were at church yesterday, they were references so we haven't actually taught them yet but we will this next week. We are very hopeful about them.

We had an unreal amount of less active lessons this last week which was what our bishopric has really been stressing to us as missionaries so we felt pretty good about that (we were supposed to have a lot of investigator lessons too but they all "fired" on us) but hopefully this week.

My companion is teaching me piano when we have extra time at the church.

My companion volunteered us to sing in the mission tour (where the Area 70 of Europe will be speaking) no big deal but she volunteered me to sing soprano and her to sing alto and I am FREAKING OUT!!!!

"Tuttle" is SUPER hard to say. Whenever I introduce myself they say "que raro"/"how strange" and they really struggle with it but it's really funny and we always laugh about how hard it is.

I would really advise each of you to go to the temple every week for the next four weeks. Change it as you need but make some sort of goal for yourself. The temple is so incredible and being able to go every week for six weeks was such a blessing and a strength to me and I can definitely feel a difference.

And finally, you know you are on a mission when you find yourself applying the church when random movie quotes go through your head. Like yesterday when I looked bad on our hard week, I had the Miracle movie quote "But no, Craig, Herb has a reason for everything he does" (when Doc is talking to Coach Patrick about Herbs extreme coaching) and I started thinking about God and how he is training me for something so much more important than my hunger or tiredness. He's training all of us.

If you ever have the opportunity to try Kinder Happy Hippos...my advice... don't. they are the most delicious things ever and super addicting... I think I'll actually try to send some home when I get the chance.

Love you all! Thanks for all the love and support! Talk to you soon!

-Hermana Tuttle