God has everything all worked out / learn to enjoy facing your challenges and trust in God

This week I'm emailing on Tuesday because we went to the temple this morning. I loved it. It's always great. We have had some great days this past week. I love being a missionary. I love everything about it. I was thinking about it the other day and the missionary schedule is so awesome! being able to study so much and have time to keep things organized and set and track goals. It might sound odd but I wish I could continue to have this kind of schedule ( i think I'll definitely keep a lot of parts of it). Anyway, on to the update for the week: We have this couple we've been teaching. They're a young newly wed couple and the girl is pregnant and they're having a rough time right now it seems. Their apartment when you walk in is completely empty. We wanted to help them out and the other day we were riding our bikes down the road and stopped to talk to a guy who was in his driveway. He started, "I don't need Jehovah's Witnesses." we told him we were missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints and he said, "I don't need help from Mormons." We started talking to him more and found out he had rented out the house he was in front of and the tenants left some of their furniture in it and he said things were going really rough in life for him right now and nothing was working out. He said the problem was that he didn't know how he would get rid of the furniture. He wanted to throw it away. We told him we could help him out. We called up President Monson and he helped us out and drove a truck over on saturday to load up the furniture. (by the way, President Monson is our Elder's quorum president). We gave the furniture to Maria (the girl whose apartment was empty). It's awesome how God has everything all worked out. We had a great lesson the other night with a guy named Mike. We have this awesome member (Brother Allison) who came with us. He is such a good missionary! He fellowships investigators really well too. Mike accepted to be baptized and I think he will get baptized. He has good intent. He's a great guy. On Sunday we had dinner at the Allison's house and invited an investigator named Abla and a less-active named Nathan. It was great. After dinner we watched the Christmas Devotional on tv. That was a great Devotional. 

Well, I hope y'all have a good week! Don't forget to read, pray, and be your best.

 I love y'all,

Elder Russell

Today is kind of an interesting day, lots of people go to this place to adore the virgin Mary, i think they think she appeared in that city

Yeah the language is coming along good, my new companion is from columbia, for some reason when I translate what he is saying in my head, sometimes it sounds like he is British, he is pretty cool. I am still in the same area as I was with my last companion. it seems like it was a while ago when I changed companions it really was like 5 days ago. I am learning probably at a faster rate now than I ever had at home, at least in weeks of time, the Lord has really blessed me. I am not just learning Spanish, as you have said living the gospel seems to sharpen all of your abilities. one thing I liked about my last companion is he seemed to visit people because he loved them not so he could write another tally mark, I remember visiting a few people with him that we just visited because they were old or crazy or something, not so we could get higher numbers. I thought I would be more scared or stressed if I ended up getting left here with someone new because I would have to remember things about the area and people. but the time came and I felt more ready, it is interesting how that happens because sometimes a while back I would have the same feeling unless me having the responsibility wouldn´t fall through, I remember before the change I just felt calm kind of cool because I was talking about grace in my prayer the night before, that really is a blessing to feel calm like that. To live a happy and peaceful life here on earth your not going to be able to just avoid every problem you are going to have to learn to enjoy facing your challenges and trust in God. I feel that over this past while I have become just a little bit more brave or faithful, better at not believing in the lie of fear and all that. One thing I like about my companion now is that he likes to obey an important rule in missionary work, a rule that some missionaries who are known to obey the rules seem to skip out on sometimes, the rule to enjoy the rules. the rules are the blessings but we cant enjoy them if we dont look around, if we dont try to have a good atitude it is like we didnt do anything, I think there is a scripture about that somewhere. 

Love you

Elder Seffker