I never realized exactly how exhausting it is to be a missionary. And I don´t mean physically. I mean EMOTIONALLY. You love too many people too much and every little thing either lifts you to the skies or pounds you into the ground. And that´s what we suffered extra strongly this week.
First off, Julio.
Oh, Julio. We had his baptismal interview and everything was fine until we found out HE´S NOT MARRIED. The sisters had been teaching him for more than 3 months and we just now found out he´s not married to Ana. AGH! It honestly never even crossed our minds that he wasn´t married. And when he was taught the law of chastity he was fine with it. That was before I got here so I don´t really know what he was taught, but when we asked him, he said he had thought the part about having to be married was just for young people. It´s REALLY sad, but I know that he and Ana will both get baptized in Chile after they get married. We felt really stupid after that and really sad. It was like someone had just punched me in the stomach. I felt sick afterwards, because we should have known. But at least he still has the desire and still has his testimony.
(And I just realized this makes no sense to those of you who don´t live in Spain. The Spanish government was sick of having to arrange divorces and so to prevent divorces, they made it really hard to get married. And especially for people from other countries. We´re talking AT LEAST 1 year and AT LEAST 1,000 €, which pretty much no one has. Our investigator who just recently got married took 3 years to be able to actually do it. It´s BAD. )
And then literally 20 minutes after finding this out about Julio we went up to teach Lourdes. Her 2 YSA-age kids, Gabi and Josué, got baptized a year ago, and are AMAZING. The Buhlers were eating at their house and afterwards Hermana Buhler called us and told us we need to go visit Lourdes. She´s from Honduras, and when we went to go see her she made us enchiladas, which aren´t like Mexican enchiladas AT ALL but are absolutely delicious. And she explained to us that she´s never actually heard the missionary discussions but she wants to (the only thing is that she might be living with her boyfriend...so we´ll see about that. We´ve gotten mixed responses to that question...) BUT she doesn´t want to get them for another 3 weeks. Why? Well, that´s the best part. It´s because she´s going to Honduras to get her 2 youngest daughters, who are 14 and 16, and she´s bringing them back here with her! She already has a testimony that the gospel is true because of how it´s blessed and changed Gabi and Josué, and I´m sure that their example is going to convert their two little sisters too! So those are 2 or 3 baptisms we have around the corner.
Also this week we started teaching John and Ilona. They´re from Venezuela, they´re both pretty beautiful people, and they have a 3 year-old daughter who is STUNNING. (Pretty sure they´re not married either. It´s the worst.) But the thing with them is that they are SO interested. He wants us to come by every single day. He had been praying to find a way to seek God more in his life, and then we contacted them on the street! They ATE UP the Restoration, he LOVES what he´s read in the Book of Mormon, they came to the elders´ baptism yesterday, met the members and the branch president, and they are just hungry for the truth. As part of the baptism the elders explained the Plan of Salvation, and afterwards he kept asking me if we could talk more about that. I told him that was the next lesson we´re going to teach him, and he was so excited and invited us to come over tonight! The best part was when we taught the Restoration to them and we recited the first vision. It was quiet for a minute and then he just said, "wow, how beautiful." And he hadn´t really understood what we had taught but he had certainly felt the Spirit. I think they´ll be the sort of people who will start their marriage papers the same day we teach them the law of chastity. :)
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