Hello everybody! Another week has passed by. Kind of a long one, and I'll tell you why!
The weather has been scorching hot out here! Super humid of course. They say it has been hotter than the peninsula, which is unusual. How this missionary is feeling: a little overwhelmed haha. I guess when I imagined Menorca before I pictured a meeting of two missionaries and like 3 people in somebody's house for church. After getting here and seeing the church and list of members, I had higher hopes! Then Sunday finally comes around: It was two missionaries and like 3 people in a large chapel haha. By the end of the meeting we had around 8 though =) Then for the classes it slowly dwindled back down to 3 again. We had the wonderful opportunity of preparing talks, doing the sacrament and music, and Elder Judd teaching one of the classes. Haven't had to do any of those in a while! It was an interesting experience however. I appreciated some of President's comments to me in response to my weekly letter. I now understand a little better about what he said of the members needing love, support, and encouragement! It seems like almost everyone is going less active, moving off the island soon, or living in sin (with regards to the law of chastity...not so popular here [yet]). I think about all the work to be done, what needs to happen. I see my goals of wanting to reactivate members, baptize new converts, and seeing at least a half full chapel, and then to think of everything that will need to happen and the time it will take, and then the discouragement just hits you across the face. So, I figure I will start to study patience, faith, and charity in my studies and think about how I can develop these more strongly. I have thought of numerous examples of missionaries in the scriptures who demonstrated these and had abundant success (and trials! The Sunday school lesson was on those. Great for my first week here =)) I feel that a great amount of trust and investment has been placed in me, both from the President and from the Lord. I know the Lord knows everything here, and from what it sounds like a lot of the members have met the president and it's a branch so I assume he knows a lot about the situation. I also got the refined "don't get too discouraged here because I've seen it before" talk by the branch president. He's a good guy, but also a little discouraged =)
We did see a few neat miracles. One, we got into a man's home knocking doors. We shared a brief message about the Book of Mormon, left him a copy, and invited him to read it. Downside is he will be leaving for Madrid this week and won't return until September. Hopefully he reads and there will be potential there. Another miracle, a member Steve (from Utah, returned missionary. He went to Utah State! Graduated with a few degrees in Spanish. He's fun, just waiting here for the painstakingly huge process of getting married with a girl here. It's a long story with lots of rants of the governmental procedures haha.) was going to drive us back up to Maó and he couldn't remember where he had put his car for the life of him. We saw the bus come and so we just got onto it instead, and lo and behold we saw a potential investigator whom Elder Judd hadn't remembered! So that was neat to see.
I feel that I have been able to bond with a lot of people here so far, so I hope that that trust can grow into miracles soon. We'll just keep working and leave the Lord the rest!
To answer some questions: it is super pretty! And filled with tourists, mostly from England who always come up to us and ask us for directions in English haha. We had to take the train up to Barcelona, then drop my larger bag off at the office, which they keep in their storage downstairs, and then off to the airport there and we flew straight to Menorca. About 40 min or so. We live in Maó, one of the bigger cities central to buses and everything. The huge port is really pretty too, and there's usually a cruise ship or two in it.
Congrats on getting all of those Eagle projects out of the way! Sounds like a lot of work that will hopefully pay off =) And a little earlier too, how great =)
Sounds exciting about the house. I liked the great ariel view pics ;) It seems like everything is just breezing on by now! That makes me glad to hear. It looks great to me!
It feels wierd to be passing the year mark finally. I've always looked forward to it thinking how weird it will be when it passes, and here we are!
As a random sidenote, I always introduce myself and show everyone our family pic you sent me. They ALWAYS say I have a wonderful family, and a guapa madre (Looks like dad chose well!) They always say that me and my brothers look alike too. So keep being wonderful =)
Well, that's about all I have for today. Enjoy some pics of our island resort =) I can't send too many though, because this locutorio is garbage... a la proxima!
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