December 23rd

 

WAHOO its almost Christmas! Except it really doesn´t feel like it, especially because here they don´t do gifts on Christmas, they do it on the Reyes Magos, which is January 6th.

SOO last Monday I did something kinda cool that I completely forgot to tell ya´ll what it was! I went to the UK and saw Africa! Let me explain. Jessie, our American investigator took us to GIBRALTAR!  I loved it! Gibraltar is beautiful, it's just like stereotypical British town on the coast of Spain. It's funny, like Heavenly Father knows that it belongs to the UK so the second you cross into Gibraltar, it's all cloudy and gray. AND BEAUTIFUL! We hiked up the rock and played with the monkeys (one of them styled my hair, I´ll send a picture) and looked around all the old military stuff left over there from WWII and then went back down the mountain and into Spain and had some Spanish tapas to finish off our excursion. It's funny because my last zone was just the city of Malaga, but now my zone here is the entire province of Cádiz. SO even though it took 1 hour and a half to drive to Gibraltar, its still in our zone! It was a fun day!

This week we did another finding week. The most new investigators we´ve ever found in a week as a mission was last finding week when we found 558. But our mission has grown considerably and so the goal for this week was 800 new investigators. I´ll admit, when I heard the goal, I was like "Okay, well this will be nice to motivate us to work hard, but we could NEVER do that!" BUT WE FOUND 847 NEW INVESTIGATORS LAST WEEK!!!!!!!! It was great. We as a companionship saw so many cool miracles because of it, the first one being our Romanian family.

We found them looking for former investigators, who has supposedly moved but we met their neighbors, the Romanians! Mario and his wife, MariOla and they have the most precious little kids. When I met that family, my heart melted in my chest and I felt so strongly that they are going to accept this gospel. I have never felt such a strong connection or conviction before about anyone else yet until I met this sweet little family from Romania. We started explaining the Book of Mormon to them and they got so excited and before we had even asked MariOla anything, she was telling us that she felt the spirit really strong and she loved how she felt with us! And then Mario had great questions and told us that if everyone in the world was like us that the world would be perfect. And then their little girl, with her raspy voice, kept on asking me when she could go to church and if we could take her RIGHT THEN! They are amazing.

ANOTHER miracle this week was... CODY GOT BAPTIZED!!! At first, we were really worried. We had gone 2 hours early to fill up the font and to set everything up. We had checked it periodically the first 45 minutes and it was filling up fine, but then 10 minutes before the baptism, we went in and the font was not even half full! We were freaking out! The drain had broken and it wasn´t filling up at all! We were so blessed because the old branch president had just showed up and he fixed it for us and got it going right again. And then Cody was like 30 minutes late so it was full by the time the program was half done. But it all turned out well and we had a really good turn out! Almost the entire American branch came! I think they were all so excited to see an actual convert baptism in their branch:) It was a great baptism and Cody felt so good and looks so happy!