24 de Marzo. Where has the month gone?

24 de Marzo

    Buenos días! I always love Mondays! They feel more like our Sundays/day of rest to us than the rest of the week. And, today is the last Preparation Day of Elder Gleason! It is crazy how the time has flown by. It seems like March just started for some reason. I can't believe it!
   We had a pretty good week. We set ourselves out to find some news. Which leads into my miracle this week: In the District Meeting we were talking about talking to everybody, and we always make the goal of how many we want to find, then we get discouraged as we get rejected, and then we don't contact as much. I suggested something that we could instead set goals for how many "no's" or rejections we would get. So, the next day I set myself a goal to get rejected 100 times. And it worked! I contacted 100 people throughout the day between visits, and they all said no! Then, as we were walking home, there really wasn't anybody left in the street (that we hadn't already contacted at least =)) and I saw a guy sitting at a bus stop. I thought, why not, I'll beat my goal! And guess what? He gave me his information!! Woo! Blessings come after the trials of our faith. And, the goal helped us to contact tons of people all day, and when people rejected, it didn't weigh me down because it contributed to my goal! Of course all the contacts I did I actually tried to teach them/get their info/ and try to get something out of it. So it was like working towards my goal and against it at the same time haha.
   I did an intercambio with Elder Johnston this last Saturday, it went well. He's a great missionary and does a good job. I like how he's a dedicated study-er and is often reading PMG or a language book or something. He's a smart guy and it was fun for us to talk and get to know each other a little better. We had a visit with a crazy old spaniard...there seem to be a numerous quantity of those here...and a funny thing was that usually people talk super fast and non stop, so you don't get any opportunity to say anything. Well, this guy talked slowly, and there was always an awkward 4 second pause between all of his sentances. It was just weird because he'd say something totally irrelevant or weird, pause as if he were done, except we couldn't tell if he was or not by how he finished his words, like as if he was going to continue, then when he did it was on something totally different. A new way of dominating the conversation I hadn't come across before haha.
  We've been seeing lots of progress with some people, except none of them came to church  We even went to go pick up 2 people, and they both left us out to dry, and they made us miss the sacrament in our morning meetings Good thing there's the afternoon meetings! So that was a little frustrating but nothing out of the usual.

Well, I gotta go! Hope all is well, and have a fantastic week!

Zaragoza sees the sun!

10 de Marzo

Muy buenas a todos! ¿Qué tal estáis? Hemos tenido una semana muy buena. Os lo voy a contar un poco!

First off, it feels like spring weather. It has been clear and sunny all week, and kind of warm actually! 18 ºC pretty much all week. You can also tell not only by how much we don't want to wear our coats, but by how much others don't want to wear coats or other articles of clothing either! Yikes! Haha it's not bad right now though, and Zaragoza is not anywhere near the beach. It is a desert though...we hear it gets pretty dang hot here in the summer! I think I might be outta here by then though and hopefully to a place more cool!
This week on Thursday we have a Mission Conference, Elder Kearon of the Seventy (1st counselor in the Europe Area Presidency as well) will be coming. It's going to be super great! They are bringing like 2/3 (almost 160 missionaries!) of the mission into Barcelona and the rest will be in Bilbao. We will be in the Barcelona group. We're all super excited!!

17 de marzo

So, this week has been a good week for us. I loved the Conference we had on Thursday. It truly was an immense spiritual feast! There was lots of great things taught and such a great Spirit. I was really impressed overall with how Elder Kearon just stopped to enjoy the moment a few times, to just bask in the Spirit and admire the sight of what he was really in, and the sight of 160 el Faro Barcelona missionaries!  He also was good at having fun, and keeping everyone awake =) It wasn't ever a problem for me but there were a few other heads I saw bobbing here and there =) We learned a ton and it was a lot about giving our extra efforts, going from our "all" to our "absolute all" that is sometimes hard to give up =) 

I think a miracle we saw was while we were in Barcelona, we had an hour 1/2 or so before our train left, so we went out to proselyte. No one was really listening as we contacted. We were coming to the end of a big street, and I saw a man who had a more radical/different appearance than the average person. I thought came to my mind how the Lord looks upon the heart and not the outward appearance, as well as various things I have been reading in talks and PMG about how we really can't judge who will accept or not. So, I figured, the way I see it, the people who look the least "receptive" might be the most! So I contacted him and we ended up teaching him about the Restoration and leaving him with a Book of Mormon! He lives in a pueblo and didn't want to leave us his number, but he said he was going to read the Book and call the missionaries.

Feb/March Updates

23 de Febrero

Hola buenos días a todos!

So, miscellaneous transfer news: I am training Elder Loaiza. He's from Colombia, but has been in Madrid for 12 years. I always find it interesting though, that even though he moved to Spain at like 7 years old, he still speaks like a Colombian more than a Spaniard. Just the lasting influence on little kids. That, or he only hung out with other Colombians haha I still haven't asked. He's nice, we have fun together. He's starting to warm up a little and get accustomed to mission life haha. He has good desires. He wants to do what is right and he desires the welfare of people we talk to in the streets. He always has nice follow-up questions for them. The other three are a trio so when E. Gleason goes home this next transfer the other two will probably stay. Elder Ballam is related to Michael Ballam, that's his uncle. He's a contacting machine and talks with everyone. Elder Johnston is more quiet, but he always says something funny when he talks, and he's really humble and studious/study-ful.

3 March

Hello everyone!

It has been a good week here. We had Enfoque de Zona, which was a really clever Disney land idea of our zone, Lleida-land/Andorra Adventure/Zaragoza World, and about it being the "happiest zone on Earth". It was inspiring to go out and find, work with members, and just succeed in everything. We also did an intercambio, Elder Roney came to Zaragoza with me. It was probably one of my favorite intercambios. I loved working with Elder Roney. He just finished 5 transfers of being ayudante de Presiedente and he is such a hard worker and is amazing at talking with people. We got tons of phone numbers and even quite a bit 10 min conversations with people who at first tell us "que no quiero nada" that most of us just let go. I learned lots of great things, it's just hard to put into practice some of those things after just a couple days with him...I would have loved to spend more to put into concrete some of the things. I guess I'll just have to really focus this week!

I admire in Elder Loaiza how he tries to put into practice what he learns. He learned a lot from Elder Weiss in the intercambio and he is always talking about things that we could try. The District is doing well. The Elders are working hard, talking to everybody. The Hermanas had a great week reaching 4 of the standards of excellence and had a ton of investigators in church, half of which have fechas! So Zaragoza is about to get drowned in miracles...

From my studies I learned something really neat from a Oct. 2012 Conference Talk by Elder Daniel L. Johnson:
"Our discipleship will be developed and proven not by the type of trials that we are faced with but how we endure them. As we have been taught by President Henry B. Eyring: “So, the great test of life is to see whether we will hearken to and obey God’s commands in the midst of the storms of life. It is not to endure storms, but to choose the right while they rage. And the tragedy of life is to fail in that test and so fail to qualify to return in glory to our heavenly home” (“Spiritual Preparedness: Start Early and Be Steady,” Liahona and Ensign, Nov. 2005, 38)."