My Second Christmas

January 13, 2014

 

 

¿Qué tal?

Guys! My Christmas finally came! My package! It was actually kind of fun to get it after Cmas and everything was over, because I was able to be excited all over again! And I have GOLDFISH and REESE´S and NEW CLOTHES!!!! I´ve pretty much never been so excited! The lucky thing is, it came the day AFTER transfers, so had I been leaving Málaga, I would have just barely missed it!

Which leads me to...transfers! So normally all the changes happen on Weds and we got Hna T´s travel plans for Weds morning so I figured my comp would be coming on Weds, but the zone leaders never told me anything differently until the Hna Israelsen told me Tuesday morning that my comp was coming Tuesday afternoon. Surprise! So we got her that night and hung out as a trio for a few hours until Hna T left the next morning. Honestly though it makes things awkward so I wish that their travel didn´t overlap. But no matter! Hna Hoffman is fantastic, I love this girl! She is most recently from Reno, Nevada and is 19 and the oldest of 5 kids and like I said, has been on the mission for the exact same time as me. However, she was in Provo MTC the entire time and then visa waited for 2 weeks in the SLC East mission. Ever since coming to Spain she´s served in Puerto de Santa Maria which is near Cadiz and Jerez. She LOVED it there and it sounds like a really cool place since they work with the Spanish branch (which just became a ward this Sunday!) and the American military branch, so they have American investigators too! She´s been at college for a year, with one semester at BYU Hawaii and one at BYU Provo. Interesting note, her mother is from Brazil! So she speaks Portuguese fairly well and has spent every summer in Brazil for the first 14 years of her life. So she loves their food and is reading the BoM in Portuguese right now and connected well with Rosemeire, a lady in our ward from Brazil. It was good to know that I couldn´t understand her very well not because she has a difficult accent, but because she literally speaks in half Spanish, half Portuguese. No wonder I can´t understand a word she says! haha.

Unfortunately I had a mini-cold this week. I felt totally fine, though, the only thing that was affected was my voice, which I started to lose after a couple days of sore throat. So when I met my new comp I had this harsh voice that sounded nothing like my real voice and I joked about letting her think I really talked that way, but she apparently was just getting over the same thing, so we spent our first couple days coughing together. Nothing brings comps together like being sick together! I never get sick, so I think this has just been from the crazy weather. It will be really warm for a couple days, then get colder again, then rain, then lots of sun. Sometimes i think I won´t need my coat and then I regret the decision and sometimes I wear my coat and end up just carrying it around. I truly do hope that we´ve seen the coldest it gets!

So, we had a lesson with Lina. It was a really goodd lesson in a way, but also really hard on me. First of all, I was nervous out of my mind because even though I´m not senior comp, I pretty much am senior comp until she knows the area and the people just as well as me. So directing the lesson was entirely on me at first, which was scary, but it went well! So that boosted my confidence in terms of my Spanish teaching ability. However, it was a hard lesson because she believes the BoM is true, she believes our Church is true, but won´t get baptized. She won´t get baptized because she feels comfortable in her traditional Church (which she doesn´t go to unless she´s visiting Ukraine, I think it´s just the traditional beliefs she won´t leave behind) and she´s scared to change. So at the beginning of the lesson she was saying ¨no¨ all together. Then we powerfully promised her that if she would be courageous and take this step of faith and be the example that her family would eventually follow her in this path. Then she said she would at least think about it again. So...I guess that´s some progress. She was going to come to Church on Sunday but didn´t in the end. I think if she would just come to Church once that would help everything but...she always has an excuse. At leeast she read in the BoM before our lesson, so hopefully she´ll read the chapter we left her before our lesson tomorrow! But it´s hard on me because Lina is one of those people that I´ve literally been with since the beginning when Hna Roan and I found her and I feel strongly that she is someone I was supposed to meet here in Málaga but it´s come to the point where if she doesn´t start progressing we will need to stop visiting her. :( We´ll see how everything goes tomorrow!

This will be a short email, but I only have one more point to make--which is to restate that miracles DO happen! So on Saturday night we literally had no plans. So from the proselyting hours of 4-9:45 we literally just had a lot of names of less actives and futures and former investigators written down. For 5 hours, 4-9, we literally couldn´t get anybody. We kept walking and even knocked a few doors here and there, but we were getting nothing. So we were getting kind of down on ourselves and were just silently walking to the next plans. A couple people were actually mean to us too, which didn´t help. since we only had 45 mins left I was sick of trying to find people and in my head was thinking about how much I wouldn´t mind just wondering around until it was time to go home, but we had just a couple more names left and so we knocked on the door of a former investigator family who hadn´t had missionaries visit them for about 8 months and they were there and let us in and we had a lesson and they were really nice. BAM. 3 new investigators. So even when you think nothing you do is working out and you´re just walking the streets for nothing and you don´t have the energy or desire to try again, just try one more time. Don´t give up. The Lord blesses you when you keep going! Miracles are the sweetest when they come at the end :)

I love you ALL! Thank you so much for your support and prayers! They are greatly needed here!

Hna Andrew