May 19--I Would Walk 500 Miles

A ver.

So first off, my companion is from Chile/Argentina (she was born in Argentina, moved to Spain, and then moved to Chile. Her mom is Argentinian and her dad is Chilean.) her name is Hna. O. She´s super cool and a really good missionary. And she doesn´t speak any English, so I´m teaching her English during language study. :)  It´s a little hard with our Nigerian investigators, but they speak enough Spanish that we can teach more or less in Spanish and then if they don´t understand something I just say it again in English.

We have an AWESOME investigator named N from Pakistan who´s come to church twice and loves everything we teach him. He doesn´t speak Spanish really well, he speaks a little more English but he´s asked us to teach him in Spanish. He´s been reading the Book of Mormon online in his language (Urdu) and he loves it. He is super nice and super cute. So we have a cita with him tonight we should be giving him a baptismal fecha! 

M is also doing pretty well, she still has her two obstacles of not coming to church and smoking. But she LOVES the Book of Mormon and loves the things we teach her. Hopefully we will see her tonight and also get her back on fecha!

R and G--lately R hasn´t been coming to church nor have we seen him this week. So hopefully we can get things going with them. We really want to challenge them to read the Book of Mormon every day as a couple--I really feel like that could save their relationship.  I am so grateful for the opportunity to teach them because I´ve learned a ton about what I do and don´t want to do when I´m married. Both of them are always so focused on the problems of the other one that they can´t or won´t take the time to do the right things themselves. It´s really sad but I know that the gospel is the only thing that could help them. 

This week I´m not really sure what happened, but we ended up walking a TON every day. Usually we don´t walk around all that much but this week things kept failing us at the last minute and we ended up walking to the very ends of Alcorcón and back. My poor companion is exhausted. 

So things are looking good in Alcorcón, we just have to keep finding more people who are going to do their part and get the ones we have moving!

I love you all, have a great week!

Hermana Lara Schaumann

May 12--Pics Catch-Up

NOTE:  Lara had been holding out on us, saving up all her pictures with her "pelirroja" from the last two months so she would surprise us with her hair-color change on her Mother's Day phone call.  So we got a bunch of them all at once!

From Lara:

So to be really quick my comp got transferred to central Madrid and tomorrow I go to pick up my new comp, who´s going to be a greenie!  So I´ll keep you posted about her next week when I find out. I´ll be staying here in Alcorcón with the elders. We have the best district in the whole world.  

And I know you were all demanding pics yesterday, so here:

All the Island Girls/STL with Elder B at the mission home

All the Island Girls! (at the Palace Hotel)

At the Temple for Conference

Me with all my F comps

All the leaders who served in the islands

Almost all of our Gran Canaria District.  We're all mission leaders now.

My favorite picture of my whole mission!

The Temple

w/ Hna F in Toledo in March

In Toledo in March

Another Toledo in March

Another in Toledo in March

In Toledo in March

New Hair! (from March)

With Hna F, at the Temple

May 5--1000 Intercambios

This week Hermana F and I have developed a serious problem where we plan at night and then we start some gospel conversation and keep talking until suddenly we realize in shock that we only have 15 minutes to put on pajamas, brush our teeth, write in our journals, and pray... We just love each other.

I ended up doing 2 exchanges, one on Tuesday, when we had our mission leadership meeting at President´s house, ate lunch there, and said goodbye to the B's, who are in Africa for a 2-week safari before heading home. I will miss them a TON. They are really just like my parents. I almost cried again saying goodbye to them. I also gave Elder B a hug 3 times right in front of President and the APs... ;)

The meeting was awesome, and I really learned a lot about our motives for obedience and working hard. We talked so much about love, both for our fellow missionaries and investigators and for the Savior, and I realized that without that love we don´t really learn or accomplish anything in the mission. When we are obedient because we love, that´s when miracles happen. So many missionaries are obedient because they want recognition or want to impress someone.  But when we obey because we want to serve the Savior the best way possible, we really do live the highest "law" or "rule", even the gospel of Jesus Christ. I know that He would rather have us obey that with love for Him than do anything else. 

The other exchange was on Friday with Hna. C. She´s super awesome, from Bolivia, and she knows Hna. M!

Speaking of Hna. M, I GOT TO SEE HER THIS WEEK! She came up to go to the temple and we went out to go get ice cream together on Thursday. She told me, to my great delight, that G, the woman we were teaching in Maplewood, GOT BAPTIZED!!!!!!! Gives me hope for all our Muslims. :)

My companion and I have turned into the Primary Presidency this week. We came to the realization that none of our investigators understand anything we are teaching them, so we really need to simplify our teaching style. We made all sorts of visual aids and things to help them see and better understand our doctrines. We´ve been talking a lot this week, with everyone, about who is God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost. So many people are confused about that, and until they understand that, they can´t understand the Restoration! 

Have a great week and Happy Mother´s Day to come!  Here Mother´s Day was yesterday. :)

Hermana Lara Schaumann

Soccer is a fanatic obsession of everyone in Spain. Latinos, Spaniards, Africans, all of them. Whenever there´s a game we rarely can find someone to meet with us, and then if we´re in the streets there´s no one, not even any sound until someone scores a goal, at which point everyone starts blowing foghorns, applauding, shouting, cheering, etc. We always know what the score is even without trying to know it. :)

Service is just usually random stuff when the opportunity comes up, such as helping people clean or move. Probably once a week or once every 2 weeks we have a service project to do. 

April 28

Thank you everyone for the birthday wishes! For my birthday I went to 2 bars, since I´m now of legal drinking age. :)

This week was better than last week, even though we had almost no lessons. We´ve developed a slight obsession with the Easter video published by the church (easter.mormon.org) and we showed it to literally every single one of our investigators. 

We haven´t seen M this week, as she´s been busy with a bunch of random things...we´ll see if she gets moving again or if we have to drop her for a little while. R and G have been doing better as well, we had a really good lesson with them yesterday and R is finally starting to recognize that he needs new friends that aren´t such a bad influence on him. He always says "oh yeah I want to do things right" and then never does anything, but yesterday there was a different spirit about him and he even started to cry. So I hope he will make the big changes he has to make to be able to have an eternal family. 

We stopped by J L this week, who´s Dominican and therefore a little flojo, to have a "make it or break it" lesson. We told him quite boldly what we were going to expect him to do and that if he didn´t do his part we wouldn´t visit him. As we were talking, his 9 year-old daughter came in.  To end the lesson, we showed the Jesus video to him and his daughter. That video has such power that after you watch it you just stay silent for a few minutes. We asked them how they felt after it ended, and he said "really good" and his daughter said "better than before I watched it."  She even got a pen and paper to write down the website so she could watch it again. We gave her a Book of Mormon and when we left she was reading it with a marking pencil in her hand. So that was really cool! 

I went on an exchange this week to Leganés, which was really fun (Leganés has the COOLEST piso in the whole mission, it´s 2 stories and you can go out on the roof and the walls are bright orange, purple, green, etc.) We went to visit a less active sister who takes care of an old couple, and the old lady told me about 500 times that I was really guapa and that I needed to find a good novio. It was SO funny. She also started singing some random Spanish folk song to Hna. B and me. 

Another funny thing that happened is that we were going on the train and then on the metro and I saw this woman with a baby and she dropped something and so I helped her pick it up and we started talking and then when we were on the metro I asked her for her number and she started giving it to us right as we reached our stop, so she gave it to us and then we had to go running out the door before it shut. Hna. B ran before me and then the doors started to close so I got a super power/adrenaline rush and made it through right before it closed. If it had closed before I got out I would have had to wait until the next stop, get off and try and figure out how to find Hna. B in an area I don´t know at all. Just goes to show that missionaries literally receive strength and protection from the Lord! 

Keep your prayers coming, we´re in pretty serious finding mode right now because we really need some good new investigators! 

Hermana Lara Schaumann

p.s.  ALSO I don´t know if any of you remember me talking about A in Las Palmas, but HE GOT BAPTIZED YESTERDAY!  Hna. S is going to send me pictures...I´ll forward them when I get them. :) 

April 21

I don´t even know what to say about this week...it was a little rough...but I´ve heard that´s normal for Semana Santa. 

Our classes didn´t go so well seeing as how everyone was out of town or had family in town and couldn´t come...but we got a lot of advertising done so hopefully we can get that going. A lot of people were really interested when we told them about it. Holidays in Spain are just difficult. 

We did have a really cool experience yesterday with working with the members. We stopped by to visit the branch president and his family and we talked about how we could help them with their family missionary work and they gave us a reference of someone his wife had met in a class she´s taking. They told us a lot of stories of how they´ve shared the gospel with either people they know or people they meet in a class or in the store or on a banch and how a lot of those people have gotten baptized!  Unfortunately, the reference they gave us last night doesn´t live in our area, but they committed to having an FHE and inviting someone!  We´re really excited about that. 

Other than that, it was a kind of tricky week. Our investigators who were doing well are now being showered in challenges and problems, and we´re not really finding a lot of new people who are really dedicated and serious about learning the gospel.  We´ve been dropping a lot of people and we´re spending our time trying to work with the members, because none of the people we´re finding in the street are really that interested. 

So hopefully things get better soon! We are still working and praying and hopefully this new focus will give us some real progress. 

Keep your prayers coming, especially for M, who had an extra difficult week, and for R and G.

I love you all and hope you have a great week!

Hermana Lara Schaumann

April 13

Yesterday marks the beginning of Holy Week, which, as my companion says, is "spring break with a Catholic twist!" Basically every day there are processions (down our street, of course) with HUGE floats with a million candlesticks and some odd statues of Mary and Jesus. A bunch of ladies dress up with big black veils, others with giant robes and hoods like the KKK (except purple!) and 4-foot long candles, etc. It´s quite interesting. So we´ll have to see what else happens, as yesterday was the first day. :) Don´t worry, I´ll keep you all posted. 

This week we had some adventures.  We´ve changed our focus a little bit to working more with the members and doing service, and we´re just getting started, but we´re excited to see how it goes!  We´re going to start a support group to quit smoking, which will be a cool new way to contact people and will help our investigators, a few of which are in this process right now. And we´re also starting a Bible study class (well, a scripture study class, because we will definitely be using the Book of Mormon) because we have a lot of investigators that would love to come to something like that, and it will be a really cool way to show the similarities between the Bible and the Book of Mormon to them. We really think this will be a lot more effective than teaching people who aren´t progressing or trying to contact people in the streets, which is what most of our time is occupied doing. 

Speaking of service opportunities, we spent a little while this week helping clean M J´s house. They´re redoing their living room, like COMPLETELY, as in they tore down walls and put up new ones, so we had to scrape and scrub drywall off the floor for a couple hours. We walked back home covered in white dust. It was really fun though! :)

We had another lesson with our Muslim friend H and her Spanish friend M.  They are both REALLY awesome and in our lessons we are so bold in teaching our doctrine exactly how it is, and they listen and I´m sure they can feel the Spirit. We always end up staying there for a really long time because we´re answering both of their questions about our doctrine and we always end up teaching so many different gospel principles. I feel SO GOOD in that house. She also fed us again and it was DELICIOUS. 

Today we went out to eat again with the B's.  They´re going home in 2 weeks!!! But we´re planning an islands reunion at Lake Powell with them in September, so we´ll all be good. :) T, a YA from the islands, is getting sealed in the temple tomorrow!  I can´t go because we live too far away, but Hna. F and Hna. H (who are companions!) will be there, and I sent her all my love. :)

Keep your prayers coming here.  I love you all and have a great week!

Hermana Lara Schaumann

Semana Santa Week Float

March 24-April 7 "Tender Mercies," "My Comp Got Kissed by Jesus," "From Trashy to Classy"

March 24--Tender Mercies
Well, things have chilled out significantly. Thank goodness.

M´s mom got back out of the hospital, and SHE CAME TO CHURCH!!! We were calling her Sunday morning, and she didn´t answer, so we were worried that she wasn´t coming, but then we went to her house and she was at the door with her skirt on about to walk out!  It was awesome!

Everyone else is still doing pretty well.  We´re feeling really good about the people we have right now and are learning a lot about how to help individuals.

Some tender mercies this week: we were walking past a bar (don´t freak out, bars in Spain are totally harmless) and this guy started to speak with us in English about God.  He was young, probably about 25. He told us that he wanted to talk to us another day and that he owned the bar and he would love for us to come by. So the next day we came by with a less-active member, and they told us that they wanted to give a discount for us to come and teach lessons there!  It was awesome!  We already took one investigator there, and we´re going to take the elders, and we´re going to start teaching this guy and his friend!  

Another one: we were walking down the street and a car pulls up and stops right next to us. The door opens and out climbs our investigator Oscar, who we hadn´t seen for a while. We said hi to him, asked him if he had a few minutes, and taught him a lesson!  It was so cool!  

Keep your prayers coming, we need them!  We´re doing well here and we´re both really happy with everything. Transfers are this next week but I HIGHLY doubt any of us will change.

Have a great week!

Hermana Lara Schaumann

March 31--My Comp Got Kissed by Jesus

At the entryway into Toledo, the former capital of Spain

An old church in Toledo

a castle near Toledo

Toledo

Looking out over Toledo

Queen of the world!

So today we went to Toledo...and as a result, I have very little time to write...and we had a really interesting week...so I´ll do what I can! AND I´ll try to send pictures. :)

So first off, things are going decently well...people are more or less starting to progress...so we´ll see. 

our highlights of this week were getting to go to an easter play of one of our investigators.  It was really good, mostly sticking to the Bible, until after Christ was resurrected and the first person he appeared to was his mother Mary??? (la Virgen María) and then it ended with Jesus appearing to the disciples, like it is in the Bible, but then when he left, they all started to pray to Mary. 

Afterwards our investigator invited us to the cast party, which we basically crashed, because we were the only non-cast people there, and the actor for Jesus came up to Hna. F and gave her besos before she could react.  (I don´t know if I´ve explained this before, but in Spain, everyone greets each other with besos, or a kiss on each cheek. As missionaries, we´re allowed to do it with women, but not with men.) usually we can avoid it, but he just came too quick.  So now we´ve been telling everyone that she got kissed by Jesus. :)

We´ve also been visiting a lot of Muslim women, and we can´t exactly teach them straight out, but we can share a lot of principles of the gospel and it´s really awesome.  Yesterday we went to visit one women named Hassnae, and when we got there she had invited her neighbor M

(a SPANIARD!!) to come and had made us A TON of DELICIOUS Moroccan food. Their desserts in that country are probably the best desserts I have ever eaten in my life. We talked about so many principles of the gospel and ate a ton and at the end, they DID NOT want us to leave, and we didn´t want to leave either but we had to get home on time. We almost had a kick ourselves out of their house because they kept following us and talking to us. It was awesome. 

So yeah, that´s the fun stuff for the week. I´ll get some pics of Toledo out for you. :)

Hna. Lara Schaumann

April 7--From Trashy to Classy

In a rather dramatic change from the trash strikes and daily riots every morning in the city center, the Ayuntamiento (Town Hall) has now begun to play classical music in the mornings. We´re supposing that they´re trying to convey an atmosphere of peace and cleanliness, although the true motives are sure to be revealed in the near future. 

This week was pretty good, kind of slow-ísh...basically I´m still on a conference high and I don´t remember anything that happened before conference...

We did have another of our Muslim friends/investigators come to Conference with us yesterday, which is a huge deal because it´s about an hour away in train and metro to get to the stake center, which is where they were showing the broadcast. And he said he liked it!  So maybe we can get him to come to church this week. :)

Since I literally remember nothing that happened before Saturday, I´m just going to talk about conference. 

We were lucky to get to watch it in English, and we got to see almost all of the sessions.  We got there late to the Women´s session, so we´ll have to watch it with our investigators later, but we saw both Saturday sessions and the Sunday Morning session.  (And we´re totally watching the Sunday Evening session in district meeting on Wednesday!)  I don´t know what themes you all saw in the talks, but I felt like almost every single speaker talked about covenants. I especially loved Elder Bednar´s talk because I felt like he explained perfectly the connection between covenants and the Atonement. As missionaries, we are trying so hard to help people feel the blessings of the Atonement and to apply it in their lives. And, as Elder Bednar explained, the only way to do that is to make covenants with our Heavenly Father and "yoke" ourselves to Jesus Christ. My favorite thing about Elder Bednar´s talk was not anything he said, but his love and desire, almost desperation, to have us understand the importance of the Atonement in our lives. As a missionary, I have relied many times on that grace, that enabling power of the Atonement. It truly is not something just for sinners or failures. It´s for the best of us just as much as it is for the worst of us. It truly helps us to overcome every weakness or failing we could possibly face. And the way to apply it is through covenants.  It´s through raising our expectations of what we´re capable of doing, and creating a need to depend on our Savior´s atoning grace. I´m so grateful for the covenants I have made and the chance that I have to renew them every week. 

I didn´t have time to talk about this last week, but we finally got to go to the temple, and it was WONDERFUL.  I learned so much from being there, and especially from being there as a missionary. I was able to receive answers for my investigators and to understand better the necessity of repentance and of feeling the consequences of our sins. It was wonderful to understand and feel more of the love our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have for us, and the reality of their great plan of salvation. 

Then last Sunday we had a bunch of problems and we were running here and there to pick up our investigators and bring them to church, and we ended up running late. We went running up the street to try and make sure we got to take the sacrament, but when we got there, the door was closed and we could see that they were passing around the bread.  Now, Spain is not like the U.S. where you can wait in the foyer and some cute litttle deacon will come out and bring the sacrament to you.  If you get there even during the prayer, that door is shut and they won´t let you in until they´ve finished the sacrament. So we had to wait outside, helpless, until they let us in. We sat down and I felt AWFUL. We had been late for a good cause (trying to help our investigators!) but Iwe had missed the most important ordinance there is. I almost started to cry when I realized that the next week was General Conference and I wouldn´t be able to take the sacrament then either. I sat through the rest of Sacrament Meeting feeling horrible and then, at the end, the branch president came and found us and invited us to come up and take the sacrament. It felt SO GOOD. It was such an incredible experience to realize how important that ordinance is to us and the power it has to truly renew our strength and our convenants to the Lord. 

Also, another thing I learned this week: Satan DOES NOT want us to go to conference. On Saturday morning before the session started we stopped by to visit an investigator and her crazy Catholic friend was there. She started talking and talking and talking about how Mary is our Heavenly Mother and how if we don´t pray to her, she´s going to get offended, and we´re ungrateful for not recognizing her power to save us. (I can listen to doctrines that aren´t true normally and be just fine, but this one made me feel physically SICK.  I felt AWFUL the whole time she was talking about Mary like that.) But anyway, as she was talking, unbeknownst to me, my watch battery was dying, and I totally thought we had more time than we did, so we stayed after she left to eat with our investigator and her family. While we´re sitting there, the phone went off and I looked at the time on the phone and we were already late to meet the members we were going to travel with to go to conference. So we had to go RUNNING out of her house and to the chapel, and then to the metro where we needed to buy our monthly passes for April. As we go to buy them, my companion gets hers out of the machine just fine, but then mine gives me the receipt but not the actual pass. So we had to call the security guy over, he had to open up the machine and inspect it, then he had to make me fill out an official complaint form with my ID and everything. (At this point we´re running about an hour late.) Then we go running up the escalator to catch the train and my companion falls and drops all her stuff and gets all scratched up.  But, we made it to conference and we were spiritually strengthened. Haha. Take that, Satan!

Nothing much else of great interest. We´re doing well and the weather has been fabulous the last few days!

Happy Conference weekend to all!

Hermana Lara Schaumann

1. Here´s a cool picture I took of the temple in between sessions of conference. :)