Email 4/9/17
Hello everybody,
This was an unusual week. On Tuesday, we said goodbye to Elder Craven, who was going home a week early in order to be able to start college in time. Because transfers aren’t until this Wednesday, Elder Trowell has been with us since Tuesday and will be with us until his new companion, Elder Newman, comes on Wednesday. It’s been interesting being in a trio, even if only for a week. Contacting and teaching were pretty awkward at first, but we quickly got into the swing of things, and the week went by fast trying to balance our time between the two areas here in Jaén.
Speaking of transfers, I’ll be staying in Jaén for a fourth transfer, and it’ll be my second one with Elder Liza. When this transfer ends in six weeks, I will have been in Jaén for roughly six months, and in the Granada zone for a few weeks shy of a year. ¡Que locura!
What’s something nice is that summer is finally ending: the temperature has been significantly cooler this week, people are coming back from months-long vacations, school is starting up again, the university students are coming back to town, and everything is going back to “normal.” The chapel yesterday was the fullest that I think I’ve ever seen it. I also was able to translate for a family from Germany who was visiting in order to drop their daughter off for the semester at the university. But anyways, I’m just hoping that some of this normality will be helping our missionary work a bit. We don’t have any progressing investigators right now, and the investigators that we do teach have been a bit flojo recently. For example, we haven’t been able to go to Úbeda to see Olga for a month, Bernardo sent us a text message on Tuesday telling us that he’s becoming an international truck driver and that he won’t be able to keep meeting with us, Ambrosio went out of town for a while, and Shirley and her family too, and we haven’t been able to find any new people to teach for a while. So yeah, hopefully things will pick back up again.
This was also an incredibly hard week for me personally, and I spent the better part of the week walking around as if I had a very dark cloud hovering over my head. In fact, by the time Thursday rolled around, I was so exhausted physically, emotionally, and spiritually, that I could barely get out of bed, and spent 24 hours straight sleeping. I felt better after that, but it was definitely like I had 15 months of unrelieved mission stress weighing me down. But, this is a new week. Hopefully something will change. As the third verse of the hymn “Lead, Kindly Light” says:
So long thy pow’r hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone.
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!
Heavenly Father is always there helping. He’s always there, in the good and especially the bad. He’s always helped me before, and there’s no reason why he would stop now.
Surprise update: After having written this whole email (and spending 40€ on groceries for the transfer), I got a surprise call from President Andersen this morning telling me that I’m being transferred to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the San Francisco Zone. So effectively half of my email from today can be ignored, but now you all know. I’m just too lazy to go rewrite what I’ve already written, so, sorry. More on this next week.
Love,
Élder Stark ??
Photos
1: Got caught in a downpour last preparation day
2: Preparation day
3: Bye bye Elder Craven
4: Three man district
5: Another day on the job
6: Fútbol
7: Out of the City
8: Until next time
