Speaking Spanish

So this week has been pretty exciting. I´ll start off with a story from Sunday. Every week we have to prepare a 3-5 minute talk in Spanish, and 4 out of the 100 people in our Zone are chosen to speak. I figured I wasn’t in any danger of being randomly selected, so I only found a few scriptures to share in the unlikely event that I was called on to speak, and called it good. Yes, I got called to speak. Yes, I didn´t find out until the guy conducting said ´´And now we´ll hear from Elder Fox.´´ But when I got up, I was very impressed- I knew EXACTLY what to say and shared 2 scriptures and just talked in Spanish the rest of the time. When people told me my talk was great, they were flabbergasted when I told them it was ab-lib with the exception of the scriptures. So my Spanish is definitely going pretty well. There are sometimes when we are teaching investigators and I´ll be speaking without thinking about what I’m saying. The gift of tongues is pretty cool. While we still have to do our part to learn the language, it´s amazing how the spirit will help us when we are speaking to be able to remember, conjugate, and speak with decent pronunciation the words that we want to use in the moment we need them, and we still are able to speak smoothly without pausing to think ´´como se dece…?´´. I am a far cry from fluent, but I am certainly doing much better than I had imagined possible. The scriptures are also crazy useful in missionary work, and I already have my Spanish scriptures marked up all over the place and can whip out a scripture for a variety of topics. 1 Nefi 2:16 is really great for explaining how we should pray to receive answers.