New Challenges

This has been a very interesting week. It started off great with the baptism of Ines. She was a "golden" contact that the missionaries found talking to people in the park. She was working as an in-home aid for an elderly Spanish woman. It is a pretty common job here that a lot of the immigrants do. It is basically slavery. She was living there and needed to take care of everything. She was allowed 2 hours every day of free time, but they had to be taken when she wasn't needed. This made it impossible for her to come to church until she was able to find other work. During that time she had read the entire Book of Mormon, and would meet with the missionaries when she could. Once she was able to find other employment, she was able to come to church, and was able to be baptized. I don't know that I have ever met anyone as excited about the Gospel as she is. We were able to sit in on some of the discussions with her, and she is amazing. This was a great start to the week. 

The next day we woke up to a very wet counter in the kitchen. Our water heater is in a cabinet above the sink, and the emergency outlet started to drip. It got all over in the cabinet and dripped on the counter below. I was able to rig up a "ramp" by taking a cutting board, and angling it down from the faulty valve so that the water would run down it, out through the cabinet doors, and drip into the sink. That worked pretty well. We called the problem in, and they started the process of talking to the owner, and figuring out how to get someone to come look at it. However, as the days passed, the drip turned into a steady stream. We tried to find the water shut off valve but couldn't find it anywhere. We even had one of the representatives of the property management company do a video call with us and we searched the apartment from top to bottom, with no success. We finally got a plumber to show up on Saturday morning. He looked all over to find the shut-off valve, and finally found it on an outside wall through one of the bedroom windows. The challenge is that he pronounced the water heater as beyond repair, and so we won't have any water until we can get someone here to replace it. 

We decided that we would go to the office on Saturday to do our wash, use the kitchen there to do some baking and to be able to use the shower. We took all of the stuff down to the parking garage to drive to the office, and the key fob wouldn't open the car. My first thought was that the battery in the fob must be dead, so we took all of our junk back upstairs, and I went looking for a place to get a battery for the fob. I found a place a few blocks away, and they were able to switch it out in about 20 seconds, and I thought that I was on my way. As I walked back to get Brenda and our stuff, I went by the garage to make sure the fob worked, and it turns out that it wasn't the fob after all, but a dead battery in the car. There were a couple of challenges here. There is no key-hole on the car door, so I didn't see any way of unlocking the car, I was also parked in a place that unless you had 40-foot jumper cables I wasn't going to get a jump. Fortunately, both of these issues could be dealt with. It turns out that there is a hidden key in the fob, that can open a hidden panel in the door handle, which covers a keyhole for the hidden key to unlock the car. (THANK YOU GOOGLE!) The second problem was also solvable as the car is a hybrid that has two batteries. The first is a normal car battery that takes care of all of the electronics on the car, and starts the computers and the engine. The second battery is the great big hybrid battery that runs the electric motors and makes the car a true hybrid. Turns out there is a button that you can push to actually jump the regular car battery from the hybrid battery, and that worked just fine. 

After we got through all of those hoops, we were able to drive up to the office, take care of the wash, Brenda was able to bake some cookies for the missionaries who are leaving for home this week, talk to the family via WhatsApp, and take showers before we drove back home. We'll be going in early tomorrow morning to take showers there, and we hope that they'll be making an appointment to come and replace the water heater as well. Although, this is Spain, so who knows when we will have running water again!

I was looking at the Church's website at the new hymns that have been released. One of them is "Faith in Every Footstep" which is a wonderful hymn. There is a music video of the Tabernacle Choir singing it. In the video it depicts the handcart companies trekking west. It shows them crossing icy streams in the snow. I realized at that moment that my poor, picked-on, whiny, attitude about not having running water in my sink is not justified in any way when compared to what they went through. The blessings that come from the Gospel of Jesus Christ are worth any sacrifice that we need to make, and every trial that we need to go through. I know that Jesus Christ is there to help us through whatever we are called upon to go through. If we will just look for His fingerprints, we will find them every day. 

There aren't just trials to go through. Yesterday, 5 of our 12 grandchildren were able to go and do baptisms at the Temple. What a special day for us, even though we weren't able to be there. Today at Church my sweet Brenda was called upon to fill in on the piano as the normal pianist is out sick. I love to listen to her play, and I felt the Spirit as she played many of the new hymns as prelude. I also was able to sing with confidence with her at the keyboard. For me, Sacrament meeting was special today in large measure because of her. How I ever got lucky enough to have her in my life is a mystery to me.

Anyway, we hope that you have a great week, and that you will see God's hand in your life this week. You will, if you just look for it. We love you all.

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