When General Authorities Come To Town.
This has been an amazing week. With great anticipation, we worked hard toward having a wonderful weekend with Elder Soares of the Quorum of the Twelve. He wanted to have a conference with just the Spain Barcelona mission and so there was a ton of logistics that needed to be attended to. We would have normally held 4 zone conferences this week, but since all of the mission was going to be coming together for Elder Soares, the President decided to hold one giant zone conference for the whole mission. It was on Friday because the next day was the conference with Elder Soares. This meant that all of the missionaries from the outlying areas needed to travel to Barcelona and stay with the missionaries here. We had to buy a bunch of air mattresses to distribute so that people weren't having to sleep on tile floors on yoga mats. We had a couple stay with us. Elder Gwilliam was amazing as he pulled all of the travel and sleeping arrangements together. He even had to deal with a train from Valencia that got cancelled, so he rented a bus to bring the missionaries from there. I'm not looking forward to balancing his credit card next week!
We held the zone conference in one of the stake centers in Barcelona. Brenda was heavily involved with getting things ready. We spent most of the week organizing the stuff that needed to be taken to the conference including teaching supplies (including about a dozen cases of the Book of Mormon), mail, cooking supplies to include giant rice cookers, and several large Crock Pots. Everything got loaded up in the mission van (The "MAV" which stands for Mission Assault Vehicle) and taken to the stake center. The food was prepared by a lady that works with Hermana Heckmann. The only thing that needed to be cooked on the day of, was the rice. Everything seemed to be in readiness. The plan was to have about an hour meeting in the early afternoon, eat, and then press on through with training events to about 8:00 PM. We had all of the rice cookers and Crock Pots in the cultural hall. Usually, in Zone conference, the senior missionaries hang out in the back of the hall so that we can sneak out to prepare for the breaks and to make sure that things run smoothly. This time, however, because there were so many missionaries, they asked us to be up on the stand. This turned out to be a problem, because even though everything seemed to be going well with the rice cookers and Crock Pots, about half way through the meeting, they blew a breaker, and so the rice only got about half cooked. No one knew about it until after the meeting because no one wanted to walk off the stand to go and check on things. Of course, everything needed to transition to plan "B" as the sisters scrambled to pull things together. They did amazingly well, and things came off ok. The senior missionaries were supposed to go out to dinner that night to say goodbye to the Romneys who are going home on Tuesday. However, things didn't wind down until well past 10. We came back to our piso and just crashed because the special conference with Elder Soares was early Saturday morning.
Saturday Morning we drove to the other Barcelona stake center for a wonderful conference. We took an iconic photo with the mission with Elder Soares which I would imagine will be in the Church News, and then had the conference. It was especially good for Brenda. They had a translator and passed out headsets for anyone who wanted them. She got to understand what was being said in a church meeting for the first time since we got here. It touched me to think that she has been so wonderful and faithful these past months when she can't understand anything at church. She is a wonderful example to me. Elder Soares talked about true Joy and how it is completely connected to focussing on the Savior. He said that when we feel true joy we want to share it. He talked about Ammon in the Book of Mormon, and how even though he had to teach people who hated him, he felt true joy to the point where he even fell to the earth. After the conference, we took the couple that was staying with us back to the airport, and got to go home and do our normal P-day stuff. This included the laundry the last batch of which took us to pretty late at night.
It wasn't done yet because Elder Soares also wanted to have a special conference with both Barcelona stakes early this morning. We had to get up early and get to the train station to ride the metro to get to the convention center where the conference was held. There were probably 3,000 people there. One of the things that touched me was a story that one of the sisters shared about a visit she had with a sweet family with two little girls. They needed to show her all of their "treasures" including taking her outside to see their bunnies. She asked the littlest one which rabbit was her favorite, and she pointed to one of them and said "that one". She said that she was prompted to ask why that particular bunny was special to her. What she said next taught her a lot. She simply said "because he is mine." Each one of us is loved by our Savior because we are "His".
We're both pretty exhausted from such a busy week, but we still get to look forward to seeing two primary programs simultaneously (Jared and Sarah's wards) this evening. Our plan is to have each of our phones tuned into one of the meetings and then calling out when something special happens and hope that none of the grandkids parts happen at exactly the same time! Should be fun.
Overall, things are going well for us even though the Romney's are going home. We won't have the ability to even call for help now. Kind of frightening, but we have known this day would come eventually. Time to "gird up our loins, fresh courage take."
We love you all, and hope that things are going well. We are just trying to roll with the punches and just keep pressing forward. The Church is true, and it's wonderful.
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