December 2, 2013
Queridos padres, hermanos, y amigos,
Guess what! The hardest day of my mission is OVER! My sister´s wedding, the only thing that I´m REALLY missing, is over! There will always be more good times with marching band, family parties, Christmases, BYU things, but this wedding was literally the only thing that I was missing that I could never get back. So now missing anything else will seem easy by comparison! But yeah, it was super hard on Tuesday thinking about the time difference and knowing at 7pm that she was getting married and I was walking around trying to find a cita to replace the one that had canceled. That´s what was hardest, I think, because in the back of my mind for a couple months now I had wondered if Nov 26 might be a particularly miraculous day or we´d find some golden investigator because I was giving up my sister´s wedding to be here on the mission, but it was pretty normal. In fact, we didn´t really have any success that day at all. So...I guess that´s just how it is. But it´s okay.
But last week I completely forgot to tell you all about miracle Sunday! (We´re not talking about yesterday, but LAST Sunday) where Michael came to Church for the first time since Hna Roan left and a less active member that we´re working with came to Church with his kids and someone who we believe will be a new investigator (florina´s sister) came as well! It was great! But yesterday wasn´t so miraculous. Michael wouldn´t come because he had to ¨search for a new job¨ and we even called him and ran into him on the bus that morning but he just wouldn´t change his mind. The less active didn´t come (but at least he let us know in advance that something else was going on). Florina´s sister came but we didn´t get to set a cita with her, but we´ll call this week.
Thanksgiving was this week! It was weird to remember that it was Thanksgiving because I was so focused for months on my sister´s wedding instead so I almost forgot. But since we are lucky enough to be serving in Málaga, the Deere´s organized a missionary Thanksgiving dinner at the chapel here. They did turkey and the office missionary couple did pies and everyone else chipped in and brought lots of food. It was amazing! And so American! We had all the missionaries there that were serving in Málaga wards and the Fuengirola ward. Super fun!!!!! President Deere had a great quote: ¨We have this tradition in America on Thanksgiving, where after eating ALL that we possibly can, we eat more.¨ ¡De verdad! But yeah, it didn´t feel like Thanksgiving at all because no one celebrates it here, so it´s not like everyone was on vacation or anything. Just a normal day!
We had a super funny contacting moment when we were going to the Church for district meeting Tuesday morning. We first ran into a bunch of missionaries in the train station (we walk through the train station to get to teh chapel). The new missionaries had just arrived from the MTC! the Deere´s were there, the office elders were there. They were also going to the Chapel to do the orientation stuff, but they stopped to talk first and we had to get there more quickly so we left the train station before them. But on the way to the chapel some guy stopped us on the street because he asked where we were from. So we stopped to talk to him and were talking for a couple minutes and while we were talking, ALL the brand new missionaries, the office elders, and the Deere´s walked by. So we looked like super cool missionaries, even though we probably wouldn´t have stopped to talk to him unless he hadn´t talked to us first...and then we got to the meeting and the other elders in our district had walked by too and they were joking that we were ¨climbing¨ (missionary term for sucking up) and were like, ¨Hey, our mission president is about to walk by, can you pretend to be really interested and talk to us for a second?¨ haha it was pretty great...
Speaking of missionary vocab, another term used is ¨dying.¨ For those who don´t know, when a missionary ¨dies¨, it means they have ended their mission and are going home. So I will die in January 2015. I´m so used to hearing the phrase that we don´t even think about it anymore, so Hna Thompson accientally said it at a member´s house when they asked about a missionary they used to know in the ward and she said something like, ¨I think he already died.¨ And the looks on their faces...priceless! Actually, the look on Hna Thompson´s face when she realized what she had said was priceless. I laughed really hard while she explained what she had meant to say!
This week was paella week, apparently. Because we were fed paella at member´s houses 3 different times in one week! I like paella a LOT so it´s okay, but it was super funny that everyone was making it this week. It is definitely on my list of things to learn how to make when I ¨die¨.
Oh, and Mom and Dad, just so you know we might switch our Pday next week or the week after in order to go to a museum that´s not open on Monday. I´m just telling you so that if we do switch it and you don´t get an email on Monday, you know why!
Sorry this is so short, I used all my email time to read about Kelly´s wedding :D Hopefully next week will be more interesting!
Love you all! Thanks for the support!
Hna Andrew
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