Elder Garrett Turley

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!