STEPPING STONES

Have you ever spent a week working so hard that when you get home at night you can barely make it into bed because you´re so tired? 

Yeah, that was our week this week. We started out every morning with our friend Jillian Michaels and didn´t even stop to catch our breath until we got home at night. We taught a total of 37 lessons, contacted 36 new people to teach, and got 9 new investigators. DEFINITELY the best numbers I´ve ever gotten in my mission. And in spite of being exhausted, we felt SO GOOD!  One thing that has always been on my mind as a missionary is a quote that I heard from Elder Holland, when he was talking about how to have success on your mission. He said, "Work as hard as you can until somebody tells you to go home." I for one, as a missionary, sometimes have the tendency to be like "AAAAAAAAH I only have 6 months left" but that´s not the best attitude to have.  And this week I really didn´t think about how much time I have in the mission or how much time I have left, I just thought about what I can do here and now for these people in Alcorcón.  And it worked incredibly well.  We saw the blessings of heaven literally POURED out on our heads.  We were really nervous to work in just 2 because we need sisters to help us with lessons (because 90% of our investigators are men...) but whenever we needed them, we found them. It was truly a miracle. We had 15 lessons with a member present, which is absolutely unheard of for us. And we had a lot of lessons fall through or people not come or whatever but we didn´t let that stop us. Whenever something fell through we just went to go teach someone else or drop by someone´s house or teach someone sitting on a park bench.  It was amazing because we were being completely and entirely guided by the Spirit to be able to find the people we needed to find in the places we needed to find them. 

We had the coolest experience on Thursday morning in our studies.  The elders are teaching a family who are working to get married right now, named M J and A, and their daughter, F, who´s 9, just got baptized in October. M J absolutely LOVES the hermanas so she asks us to come by and visit her once every couple weeks. We had an appointment with them on Thursday night, so the morning in our studies we were trying to figure out what to teach them.  I just looked at the conference Ensign, said a quick prayer in my head, and opened it up and started reading the talk. When I started to read it, I instantly thought of another talk, the one from Elder Bednar in the CES devotional last March. (http://www.lds.org/broadcasts/article/ces-devotionals/2013/01/that-we-might-not-shrink-d-c-19-18?lang=eng) I had printed it off in English, so I read through it and really felt like that was what M J needed to hear. That talk talks about D&C 19 and also the story of Jesus calming the waters.  When we finished our personal study, we went to start our companion study with a hymn, and Hna. F had picked "Master, the Tempest Is Raging"  I was shocked at the coincidence because I had just been studying about that very story. When we started to plan the lesson, we realized that as I was reading that talk, Hna. F

had been reading D&C 19!  We felt so strongly as we studied together that they needed to hear that message.  And when we taught it to them that night, the Spirit was so strong and it had really been exactly what they needed to hear. It was amazing to see how both of us had responded to the promptings of the Spirit that morning in our studies to be able to be prepared to teach them that message that they so desperately needed. 

Our other investigators are doing pretty well, nothing too exciting or dramatic with them.  R will be getting baptized this coming Sunday, so we´re happy about that. He is such a good little guy.

This week we have our mission tour with the Area President, and I have a leadership meeting, so we´re going to be on temple square ALL DAY on Wednesday. It will be crazy.

Also Hna. F and I taught Relief Society this week because our friend K, who´s an American and served a mission in Chile, couldn´t do it.  It was on President Packer´s talk from conference.  We used Preach My Gospel for like half of the lesson.  That book is really the best resource for teaching in the church.  It´s AWESOME.

Our little adventure this week: We may or may not have done a little bit of dumpster diving...In Spain, there´s no DI or Goodwill where you can donate your old clothes and things you don´t want, so people just set them outside the trash receptacles. We went to take out our trash and ended up spending a good while sorting through the stuff that was there. We got a blanket, a tablecloth, some bedsheets, about 15 sweaters, a shirt, a scarf, and 2 pairs of dress pants. We washed them all, don´t worry. The best part was when we were doing it, the stake Relief Society President walked by...we´re not sure if she realized what we were doing or not...hopefully not...

but I´ll attach some pictures of the dumpster dive, for your entertainment.