Musser Mission Blog

  Well, here in Spain we're doing the "fall back" daylight savings shift today. It was sure nice to get an extra hour of sleep because this has been kind of a crazy week. You know you're busy when you look up from your computer screen in the mid-morning and realize that it's like 3:30 and you didn't even get a chance to eat lunch. There were a couple of days like that. One of them was the day when we had the Mission Leadership Council. This is where all of the mission leadership travel to Barcelona for some training from the Heckmanns and coordinate the work. It was interesting because the Assistants to the President had put together all of the training presentation per the agenda, and when they were getting ready to go up and do the presentation, President Heckmann said "we're not doing that. The Lord wants me to focus more on the Book of Mormon, and so that is what we are going to train on!" The Lord takes care of His missionaries, and He does ...

  This past week was pretty exciting. It was the second transfer week that we have participated in. We received 15 brand new missionaries. The excitement started on Tuesday. That is when the elders and sisters that went home arrived in the mission home. Our office space was cluttered with luggage, and missionaries as they waited their turn to have their exit interview with President Heckmann, and then waited to be able to eat dinner with the President and his Wife. It was fun to watch as they were preparing themselves for what comes next in their lives. The plan was that they would be taken to the Airport the next morning and dropped off while the new missionaries were going through customs and then be ready to be brought to the mission home. There are a few of them who are local, or who came on an earlier flight from the Brazil MTC. However, the best laid plans always seem to get disrupted. We had a notification that the incoming flight from the States was delayed for two hours, w...

 I can't believe that we are already two months into our mission! We still feel like we're greener than green. This has been a week of long days. On Tuesday and Wednesday, two of our office missionaries had birthdays. Mom made a giant cookie for one (his request) and a plate of goodies for the other one. The missionaries in the office are starting to feel like our kids to us. We love them, and are really proud of the wonderful work they do, and the great young men they are. We had our first "piso inspection" this week. It was in the apartment of 6 sisters. It was an interesting experience and it's going to be fun to get out and get to know more of the missionaries here. They're awesome. We had another Friday night institute / YSA crazy night. The institute classes start at 8:30 and then they feed them all dinner at 9:30 as the kids all hang out together. We got to bed after midnight and were glad to be able to sleep in yesterday.  Saturday was kind of a wild d...

 We had a pretty amazing week this week. We got to participate in a "Senior Missionary Conference" in a place called Tarragona. During the conference we were asked to introduce ourselves and talk about our responsibilities. It was nice to get to know the other senior missionaries a little and get some instruction from President and Sister Heckmann. The more we get to know them, the more we love them. We also went on a guided tour of ancient Roman ruins through the town which has been built up around them. It was really fascinating. The tour guide spoke in pretty rapid Spanish, but I was able to get the gist of what he was telling us. Sometime if you want to be bored to tears I'll talk about what I learned, but one site kind of stood out to me. It was the ancient gladiator ring. When the persecution of the Christians was at a high point, they took the local Bishop and two of his deacons and killed them in the ring. Later the Christians built a church in the middle of the r...