Email 18/9/17
Hello everybody,
I think that I always start my emails saying that it was a crazy week, but this week was indeed an insane one. So I’ll just kind of go through it day by day.
On Monday, we decided to go to Él Puerto de Santa Maria and have a district preparation day. Puerto is an interesting place because there’s an American Naval base really close by, and a couple thousand of Americans that live in the city. In fact, Puerto is home to what I believe is the only English-speaking church unit in Spain, which is the military branch. We mostly just played fútbol and ate at Burger King and emailed.
Tuesday was mostly a normal day. We had a noche de Hogar with a member and a few of her friends who want to know more about the church, and it doesn’t get much better than doing missionary work with the members.
On Wednesday, we met with Alfonso, who is an investigator. He had been meeting with the missionaries some time ago, stopped for whatever reason, but had recently called them back up desiring to meet again. We were able to have a super good lesson with him about the Plan of Salvation, and he accepted a baptismal date for October 7th! So let’s hope that keeps going well!
On Thursday, we had to go back to Puerto to have our district meeting. Then on Friday, we had to go back to Puerto for a third time that week. I just realized that three times is a lot of times to go to Puerto in a week. On Friday, we spent the night there so that we could wake up super early on Saturday morning to catch a bus to go to Málaga because of our mission conference with Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles!
It was such a blessing to be able to have an Apostle of the Lord visit us, and it was also super cool to have the entire Spain Málaga mission together — all 180+ missionaries — for the first time in years. To give a recap of what happened at the meeting, Elder Paul V. Johnson of the Seventy (and President of the Europe Area) was also there with his wife, and they both shared some remarks with us. Looking back on my notes, they both talked a lot about love and how, in the words of Elder Johnson, “the real power of the Gospel of Christ is in love and in truth.” Then, we were able to hear from Elder Holland. The subject line of my email is a comment he made referring to what generally happens when he visits missions with problems with disobedience or other things. Haha. Luckily, he said that he his eyes we have “a good and loyal mission” and that “the mission seems in good shape,” so we were spared from the caña de Holland. I mean, he only pounded the pulpit four times, so that’s a pretty good sign, right? His remarks touched on a lot of the things related to the importance of sharing the gospel in preparation for the second coming of Jesus Christ, working hard and “swimming ’till the last stroke” of the mission, and the importance of teaching about revelation! We also all got to shake his hand. It’s a shame that this Conference only lasted two hours because the spirit was in such a rich supply there, but it’ll certainly be an experience that I will never forget.
Then yesterday, Sunday, we had to get up early again because it was stake conference here in the Cádiz stake. This involved taking another bus ride, this time to San Fernando. One of our eternagators, Moisés, came with us mostly because he has a man crush on the Stake President. Unfortunately, due to some disagreements he’s had with some of the members, things ended up going super badly and now we’re kind of worrying about how to fix things up, but things always end up working themselves out.
That’s all from Spain for this week. I love you all.
Élder Stark ??
Photos
1: District preparation day in BK
2: Always clouds
3: Atlantic Ocean
4: Party bus
5: Not so party bus
6: Las preguntitas: Hermana Brantley, Elder Kassing, Hermana Gibson (who was in my district in Elche), Elder Moon, Elder Cox (who was in the Granada district with me), and Elder Stark
7: Stake conference with Moisés
8: Until next time
