A Hard Week

This week was probably one of the hardest I´ve experienced on my mission. It was the 4th week of the transfer and we still don´t have an investigator. Thankfully this last week we taught a lot more lessons than before (the week before we only taught 5), but they were all member or less active lessons. Which are good, because that means we´re stregthening the ward. But we aren´t teaching anyone new, and that´s kind of discouraging and frustrating. Hermana Roan and I keep reminding ourselves that we´re working on developing patience and dilligence. Whatever we´re supposed to learn from this we´re still learning, and that´s okay.

Even though it was hard, there were lots of good things too. I´ve been really understanding the people of the Book of Mormon a lot better and learning all sorts of things. Like in Alma 25 it´s naming all the Lamanitish cities that  were converted. Then it mentions that any city that had Amukites (can´t remembber how to spell that) no one converted. It was a good reminder to me to keep bad influences out of my life, because those things drag me down.

A little later, Aaron is teaching King Lamoni´s father. Seeing this whole section through missionary eyes totally changes it. But mainly what I saw was that Aaron and his bretheren had just gone through horrible awful trials. And because they had endured them well and stayed strong in the gospel, they were SO blessed. They were able to help so many people and feel the joy of doing that. It was nice to hear and remember this as we´ve been going through a tough week. The Lord was telling me to stay strong and hold on. 

María is doing a lot better, she stayed for the full 3 hours of church for the first time ever! I was so proud of her! It´s really hard for her to do since she has a little boy that´s autistic that she leaves home with her oldest son (he has no interest in the church at all), but she did it! And she wasn´t gtrudging at all. It was a good way to end the week.

This week we visited a family we´ve never visited before in a pueblo. Naomi and Paco don´t have any kids but they have 3 dogs and one of them just had puppies! they were ADORABLE! I´m not a huge fan of yorkies, but yorkie puppies are so cute. They didn´t have their eyes open yet or anything. They breed yorkies for a living and Naomi is obsessed with her dogs. They´re pretty much her babies. It was making me laugh to see her baby her dogs. I feel like everyone I´ve met in Spain is such a character.  They all belong in a movie or a book.

This week our zone got together for a special pday and played softball. The Castillos ( a senior couple in the mission) came and brought lunch and a bat and a gloves, etc. We had a zone training meeting before then all walked over to the field together. It just made my day to play softball. I haven´t played in a long time so I wasn´t very good, but that was just fine because neither was anyone else. The Spainiards were very confused by the idea and never knew when to run. There´s an elder from Germany and he picked up how to play super fast. He´s really athletic. He hit a home run and caught a crazy catch out in outfield. I think all the american´s jaws dropped. It was like he´d been playing his whole life. It was super nice of the Castillos to do that, they´ve done it with a few other zones and it´s so, SO much fun.

We made it up to the natives by playing soccer with them after people started getting tired of softball. I didn´t feel like getting creamed at soccer so me and an elder with a hurt knee (did I ever tell you about that? He had a torn ACL miracle. Everyone thought his ACL was torn but the results showed that it was some thing about cartilage. HUGE MIRACLE. All he needs to do is physical therapy and he can stay on his mission. Even the doctors called it a miracle since it was so clearly an ACL tear) and Hna Roan threw  softball around instead. 

Last thing. Food. Hna Roan and I got ourselves fresh mini dognuts with chocolate on top. SO good. She actually had a waffle with chocolate on it. All those foods we consider breakfast food in America they eat as desserts here. I think this says something about American breakfasts... 

And at María Guzmans house (we eat with her every week and help her take care of her sick/old mom) we had yams and pears that had been cooked together. It was kind of wierd. 

Love you all so much! Stay strong! Have a good week!!

Hna Woolley