First big difference. THERE´S A REAL LIFE CHAPEL! I haven´t seen one of those for a year. Pictures coming. It´s one of the oldest church buildings in all of Spain, because apparently there was an American air base once upon a time. In Telde and Oviedo, we were in little bajos, and now there´s a parking lot and futbol field. In church on Sunday there were nearly 100 people! And a pianist who wasn´t a missionary and a bishopric! With functioning counselors! The only problem is to learn everyone´s name, and I´ve decided to give myself 3 more weeks to do it. On Sunday we filled up about 3/4 of the ward. And in Spain, the whole country takes the month of August off. Anything that isn´t a convenience store or a restaurant is closed - mechanics, post offices (half day), hardware stores, all non-essential things are shut down until the country wakes up again. This means that, come September, those empty seats are going to fill by themselves and I´ll have to learn everyone´s name again.
On Sunday, the Bishop (more on him in a sec) got up and said, "We will now hear from the new missionaries in our ward. They can come up and introduce themselves now." With about 30seconds notice, I got up while the hermanas stay seated (I got chivalry comments later on:) What´s great about studying the gospel every day is that I had no lack of ammunition - it was just odd to be standing in front of what was a large group of people. I shared Moroni 10:4-5 and Ether 4:11 In my old areas, I could count endowed members on my two hands - here, we had a high priests group AND an Elders´ quorum. In my old areas, the Branch Presidents had 2 and 11 years of activity in the church. Here, there was an entire bishopric of men who had been serving in priesthood leadership positions for their entire lives. Not a good or a bad thing - just a wild change.
The bishop here is a spiritual giant. Day 1 he looked at me and said, "Thank you for sharing such nice scriptures about the Book of Mormon - we needed that. Your first job here is to meet me. Why haven´t you done that yet?" I told him that he had stolen my chance, and we had all the missionaries in for a nice talk. He told us that he was determined to give us the most work we could possibly imagine - that it would be coming out of our ears (a saying I didn´t know translated into Spanish.) He promised meetings and references and my favorite part was that he said, "And if I don´t like your work or if I don´t like how prepared your investigators are, I´ll tell you. I once told a missionary in all seriousness, "Tengo ganas de verte ir." " He really expects a lot of us and expects to work a lot with us, which is nice because I do not like working independant of the ward one bit. He´s also really funny - Being Valenciano, he speaks spanish really fast and pretty clear, and working in the MTC, he tries to make himself very expressive in his gestures and language. I met him there and he was one of the first people I could understand.
Well, that´s all for the week. Pictures coming if the Ipad decides to work.
Love, Elder Stew
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| Stewart with Elder Dussant |
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| Stewart's a Grandpa |
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