Tons of Books!

 


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 fun to have them. The crazy thing was that when they went up to Rubi to have their appointment, all of their paperwork was in order, but when the immigration people pulled up Sister Haynie's information the Spanish government had entered her home country information as being from Cuba! They totally recognized their error, but couldn't get their headquarters people on the phone to fix it. It means that Elder and Sister Haynie will need to come back again to get it all straightened out. The crazy thing is that they go home this summer, and so this is just to get them their card for a few months so that when they go to leave they won't be tagged as illegal and be banned from coming to Spain for several years. I guess that every government has its own quirky rules to deal with. 

On Wednesday Brenda cooked lunch for the missionaries. It just happened to coincide with a bunch of missionaries who were coming into the office to have their interviews. So, it was a kind of "Loaves and Fishes" moment for us as we ended up feeding probably twice as many missionaries as planned. After the meal two sweet sisters (Sister Bleda and Sister Fernandez) came into our office to share a scripture with us like they normally do with a regular dinner appointment. The Spirit from these two sweet missionaries was as strong as I have ever felt it. Proof positive for me that these wonderful missionaries wield the Lord's power, and that He is definitely in the work with them. It was an amazing experience.

No extra pictures this week. I guess I'll just have to do better next week. Please know that the Lord's Gospel is real, and that you are loved!

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