Sunday: Mass

This morning was church... I've been thinking that I really want to do a musical number in church, and Joel sent me the music for it this week, so after sacrament meeting today I asked the bishop if I could play something next week.  He was a little confused at first because it's not a song from the hymn book, but it all worked out.  I'm pretty excited.  I want to invite Carmita, Carmita, and Sergio because I think they would think that was fun. :)


After church, we came home to lunch, nap (church was pretty hard today - I was so tired!), and I had to work on my paper that's due tomorrow that I couldn't finish last night.  Speaking of last night, I'm feeling good today!  I still have cold symptoms, but my flu feelings are all gone.  I am so thankful for the priesthood!  Also, it was a really nice blessing today that I was able to focus on my paper and work hard on it while still maintaining the feeling of the Sabbath in my heart.  That's one of the reasons I don't like doing homework on Sundays - it's difficult for me to keep the feeling of the Sabbath when I'm reading a textbook or something - so it was good today. :)


A little before 6, we left with Carmita to go to mass with her! I was really excited! I'm pretty curious about other religions and don't really know much about them, so it was a really neat experience to get to mass with her.  For some reason I thought everything (at least the music) would be in Latin, but nothing was!  In fact, when I told Sergio that, he kind of laughed at me for thinking that. :)  Everything was in Spanish, though.  Oh yeah, I forgot to say, one of the reasons Carmita invited us to go was because Carmita plays the guitar to accompany the choir and is also the choir director, Sergio sings in the choir and also plays a percussion instrument, and they were singing in mass today.  I was really impressed!  They were good! and also tiny - the choir only had like, six people in it.  They were really good, though.  And the music was fun - it reminded me of Christian music you'd hear on the radio.  


Speaking of things being different than I expected - mass was completely different than I thought it would be! As was the church. I wish I'd taken a picture, but that would've been awkward since it was people's actual church service. Instead of looking like the stereotypical Catholic cathedral, it instead looked like a big gray contemporary building and the inside was all white with hardly any statues, paintings, or stained glass.  When you walk in, instead of being in the chapel part like cathedrals I've been in, you're in a hallway where you can pick up a program and stuff.  Also, Carmita showed us afterwards, down the hall from there are a bunch of boxes in the wall that contain people's ashes.  I wasn't really sure how I felt about that.


When the service first started, I'll be honest, I felt a little creeped out by everything.  Well, when it first first started, I thought it was cool, but after a couple of minutes I started to feel a little creeped out.  It was all so different from what I'm used to.  As time went by, though, I was able to appreciate how they worship.  You can tell that the people like Carmita really believe the gospel and are trying to be the best they can be, and if they know an imperfect way to do that, well, at least you can tell that they're doing all they know how to do to be worship God.  After taking communion there's a part where you can unfold your little knee bench and pray (kind of like how people ponder after the sacrament in our church), which Carmita did, and my heart was touched at that part as I realized that some people just don't know the best way yet, but that doesn't mean that what they're doing is creepy or that it can't help them get closer to Heavenly Father.  Anyway. Those are my thoughts on the mass :)


When we got home, we were home for the night.  I finished up my paper by 11 and then just got finished having a hilarious conversation on our group's page on fb :)  It's things like that that make me wish sometimes that we could speak English to each other - I feel like I would be way better friends with some people if I spoke English instead of Spanish with them, but oh well - I'm here to improve my Spanish and am still friends with people, so it's okay :)