Musser Mission Blog

  This has been kind of a crazy week (aren't they all?). The highlight was receiving 4 pallets of copies of the Book of Mormon (English, Spanish, and Catalan). It's all part of getting ready for a rather unique holiday that they have here in the Catalonia portion of Spain where the tradition is that you gift a book to a friend or neighbor. I don't think that you could come up with a better tradition for gifting the most important book in the world! That being said, we didn't start out wanting quite that many copies. Our new secretary was ordering and it seemed like the website wasn't taking his order, so we ended up getting a lot more than we wanted. So, it's very possible that the Lord was just kind of helping us have plenty of copies to saturate the mission with.  We also had a couple from the Islands come over for their residency appointment. They stayed with us overnight. Elder Haynie is our senior missionary district leader. They are delightful and it was f...

 "Germany" you ask? "Weren't you assigned to Spain?" That's a fair question. As we shared a couple of weeks ago, I had some chest pain that landed me in the emergency room of a local hospital for several hours. I had hoped that this would be the end of my troubles, but the mission nurse, the area medical advisor, and my Cardiologist Mission President, decided that I needed to have a full cardiac workup done. President Heckmann is very successful Cardiologist with his own clinic in Germany. His son is also a cardiologist and is taking over the practice for his dad. Since the trip to the emergency (2 blood tests and an x-ray) cost me 600 Euros, President Heckmann said that the mission would pay for me to fly to Germany. I could rent a car in Stuttgart and drive the hour and a half to Heidlberg where his clinic is. We could get the workup done, for way less than it would cost in Spain. We would stay the night in his house, and then return early the next day. We...

We had heard that 3 Kings day (the day they celebrate the 3 wisemen finding the Savior) is a big deal here in Spain. They told us that there were going to be parades and that the main parade would start at the docks where a boat would come with the 3 kings on camels who would then parade through the city. We decided that since this would all happen on Sunday that we wouldn't go downtown looking for anything. Right after I had finished last week's blog entry, I heard some noise outside, looked out our window down to the street below, and saw that they were lining up for a parade. Brenda and I decided to go down and watch. We got a pretty good spot and stood there for quite a while until the parade kicked off, and got some photos of the fun. We couldn't stay until the end because we had a dinner appointment at the Larrosa's with several of the missionaries. It was a fun night.  On Monday we knew we needed to hit things hard because we had 3 days to get 5 days worth of wor...

 Wow, I can't believe that we are already into a new year! We hope that you all had a fun celebration with loved ones, and are using the new year as a time to take stock and ponder what the coming 12 months will hold in store for you. As we work with missionaries who are preparing to go home, one of the questions that we ask is for them to give us a "12 month vision" of where they are going to be in a year. In 12 months, we will still be here, and hopefully a lot more comfortable in our responsibilities! In Spain they have a new years tradition that when the clock chimes 12, that for each chime, you eat a grape. Each grape is supposed to bring you luck for one of the months for the coming year. President and Sister Heckmann held a video call with all of the mission at 10:30 on the 31st and then we pretended that it was actually midnight, and ate grapes so that we could go to bed and get up and go to the office the next morning. It was kind of fun. However, my poor Brenda ...