Dear everyone,

As of right now, I have been a missionary for 3 months and 4 days. Who would´ve known that the time would fly so fast. I thank the Lord for the many blessings he gives me and the many, many miracles he lets me see everyday. I would like to share a few with you.

First off, the Gift of Tongues. To start off with, I´m not fluent. But, I will say that my abilitly to speak Spanish has increase so much since I left home. The Lord has placed certain Spanish speaking Elders in my path that have helped me so much to learn Spanish faster than I could´ve hoped. And one thing that makes it even more of a blessing, is that I probably speak English more that 50% of the time here in Lorca, both to my companion, and we teach a lot of Africans. It´s funny to hear people tell me I´m basically fluent, and it is a blessing to get compliments from native Spanish speakers on how good my Spanish is. There have been several times where a native will ask me how long I´ve been out in the field, and when I tell them 2 months, they think I´m lying. It truly is a blessing from the Lord to be able to communicate half-decently with people from halfway across the world.

The importance of members! Pass this message on to everyone you can. I gave a talk yesterday in church, and talked about how we can see miracles if the members and the full-time missionaries will work together. I started off by saying that I was a representative of Christ, and then I promised blessings that would come from the cooperation of members and missionaries together. It was powerful, and it was amazing to hear some of the words that came out of my mouth as I was saying them. It was nothing to fancy, and it was given in broken Spanish, but as I talked to this small branch about how we could become a ward, the Spirit just continued to fill the room more and more. I spoke for almost 25 minutes in Spanish to this branch, and then my time ran out so I had to hurry and bear my testimony. I wish I could´ve spoken longer. A couple hours after church, we brought a member to a lesson. The exact things that I testified of in Sacrament meeting played out before our eyes. As we brought a member into the home of this investigator, his name is John, they immediately became friends (probably cause they were both from Africa, but still...) and John opened up. The Spirit was so strong, and he didn´t want us to leave. I hope and pray that everything else will go well with him and that we will be able to continue to work with him and the members.

Right after that lesson with John, we got a call from this nonmember that comes to church everyweek, named Rosie, who just needs to get married before she can get baptized. Anyway, Rosie told us that her father wanted to be baptized. Rosie´s dad (I don´t remember his name, it´s the same as some city that is close to Rome and starts with a "B") lives in Ecuador, but had come to visit the family, and came to church to listen to his youngest daughter and child, Kerly, give a talk. This 14 yr old young woman, gave a 10ish minute talk on faith. It was wonderful! And now her father wants to get baptized. We are going over to teach him tonight, and hopefully everyday between now and a baptism.

Yes dad, we have investigators, but more of them live outside of our area than live in our area. We have a friend named Khalifa, a Muslim from Morocco, who is currently living in Morocco and calls us at least 2 a week, but we can´t call him back. We committed a family in Ghana to go to church a week or two ago, over the phone of a member here in Spain. A Romanian son of our Heavenly Father committed to read the whole Book of Mormon this week, but lives in Barcelona. And one of my Ghanaian brothers named Sunny, lives in Murcia and is ready to hear the Gospel.

Some of our investigators, are a Ghanaian named Alfred. He wants to be baptized, and one of the first questions he asked us, was "Who in your church has the authority to baptize me?"
Simon is another of my Ghanaian brothers, and he is scheduled to get baptized July 27th, but keeps telling us he needs to read more of the BoM before he gets baptized.
John, is another one of my brothers from Ghana who we visited with a member on Sunday. He loves the Gospel, and was literally falling off his seat as we taught him. He attends the Evangelical Church, but says that if God tells him in his heart to follow our church, he will.

With any luck, we will have 4 baptisms in the next month. I pray that we will be able to find the answers that these people need, and that the Spirit will communicate to us how we can best teach them.

We watched the broadcast this morning at 8 am, as it was being broadcasted live at midnight here in Spain. I am not yet priveledged to get on Facebook and have blogs going to share the gospel, and we don´t have Ipads yet, so I´ll keep praying for that, but we get along just fine without them. But I encourage everyone to look for missionary opportunities. In whatever you are doing, and as you seek those opportunities, the Lord will bless you with them.

I love you all, and wish you the best of luck being Member Missionaries!

Elder Garrett B. Turley

Here are some awesome pictures. We´ve got some FuFu, which is an African dish made with cow hide and pig intestines. Then a giant dish of Paella. Also some pictures of me with some members and other missionaries. Love ya!

Garrett, his investigator, and Elder Oldroid

statue of Jesus

Garrett learning how to make paella

Garrett's Email is:
garrett.turley@myldsmail.net

Garrett's address is:

Felipon de Cope

33 3^◦ E 28600

Lorca, Murcia

Spain

Well this has been quite the week. A lot has happened, and the Spirit has been strong.

Last Monday was my first Pday. Elder Oldroyd (He just happens to be from Mesa, he lives a couple miles away from me, and we graduated together. It is a small, small world) and I went and got haircuts from a Moroccan guy, and we both look like Moroccans, pictures to come next week, I can´t send pics from this computer. I took almost 100 pictures just in the last week, there is so much cool stuff here. Anyway, we got haircuts and went and played soccer for 3ish hours with a bunch of nonmembers and one of them invited us over to his place to talk with his family. The Lord really does work in mysterious ways.

A normal day for me consists of waking up at 7:30, excercise for 30 minutes (usually we go for a jog in Spain), and then we have shower, breakfast, and study time until 11:30. After that it´s time to work. We come back to our apartment at 2pm for Medio Dia, and have more study time, and then head back into the streets at 5:30. Then we work until 10:15-10:45 at night, and then lights out at 11:30. It´s super tough not to take a nap in the middle of the day, especially right after a huge lunch and then we have to study. We don´t get fed too much here, so we are on our own to make food. Basically, grilled cheese sandwiches are where it´s at.

So this past week we have had many adventures. We had Zone Conference, in Murcia which was awesome. There are so many beautiful pictures there, and I´ll be sending those home soon. We also had some super spiritual lessons, and several experiences where we were paying attention to, and listened to promptings. The Spirit is just so wonderful, and the more you listen to it, the more you recognize it. What a wonderful truth.

I am growing more accustomed to talking to random people and trying to talk to them. I invited a random guy on the street to come to church with us on Sunday, but he didn´t want to come. One of these times though, someone´s gonna say yes, and it´ll be awesome!

Here are some of the people that we´re teaching right now:

Mirian: This is our number 1 investigator right now, and we are going to challenge her to baptism this week (possibly tonight). She is from Honduras, and is alone here in Spain looking for work. I don´t know why she came to a country with 27 percent unemployment looking for work, but whatevs, I´m not complaining, cause now we are teaching her. She has a wonderful understanding of The Gospel of Jesucristo, but as soon as we try and apply that to our church she kinda shuts down. We have to figure out how to teach her simply and bodly is what Elder Oldroyd is saying, and so we are going to teach her simply about the Restoration tonight. Wish us luck... (oh yeah, she came to a church activity and church, and read the Intro and testimonies in the front of the BoM, so she was keeping commitments before we even extended them).

Saturday: What a great guy! He is also super knowledgeable about the Gospel and is from Ghana. It is soo fun to speak English with these guys. It is a whole different language. If I come home sounding and praying like a black guy, don´t be too surprised.

Angel: A great guy who knows a lot about the church. He asks question after question about the church, and we can show him the answers in the scriptures, and I think he feels the Spirit. We are going to try to take more control of the lessons in the future and tell him that these lessons will answer a lot of his questions that he has.

Those are all of our really good investigators right now, and I really hope that we can touch all of their lives for the better.

We almost got robbed by gypsies this week. Well, kinda. Elder Oldroyd thinks so. I was oblivious to the fact that we might have been getting robbed, so I´m not exactly sure what happened. But we are gonna go teach the family sometime soon. We just aren´t gonna bring anything that they can steal from us except for some Books of Mormon.

I gave a talk in Sacrament Meeting yesterday. It was such a great opportunity for me. I feel like my Spanish was half decent. I´m pretty sure that I sounded the same as I did back home, just talked slowly and thoughtfully, which was really helpful cause it gave me time to think of how to say things. It was a 10 or 15 minute talk, and I didn´t even share half the stuff I wanted to. I led the music again this week, and also helped prepare the Sacrament. There are supposedly 180 members of our Branch, but we have 20-35 show up every week, so there are a lot of people who do double duty in the Branch. It is amazing to see the strong members of the Branch step up and help the work of the Lord move forward.

Scripture of the week is Luke 22:32. This is one reason I am out here. I have felt the Spirit more in my everyday life here than ever before. There´s a spiritual experience to be had behind every corner here in Lorca. And it reminds me of something Elder Holland has said, that the mission is as real as life will ever get. This is Real Life, capital ´R´capital ´L´ and it can be the same for everyone, regardless of whether they are on a full time mission or not. I invite you to look harder for the Spirit in your everyday lives.

Well, that´s about it for this time around. I love you all and wish you a happy week. Know that I am praying for all of you, and working hard.

Love ya!

Elder Garrett B Turley