08/04/2010

Family and friends! How are you all doing? So you´re probably all wondering why I´m writing this on Wednesday and not on Monday. Well on Monday we had to go into to Barcelona for concilio. It´s a meeting with all the zone leaders and President and Hermana Hinckley. Anyways, we had to leave our piso in the morning, and the meeting started at 5:00, and with travel and all we didn´t have time for internet. Today President Hinckley told me it was fine if we took an hour sometime and hurried to write home, so yeah. So right now I´m still in Barcelona, but I´ll talk about all that later. First off with last week. So last week was crazy, with a brand new area and all. We were extra blessed though. So the big miracle is that even though we missed the first few days of the week, and we started off Thursday with only 3 lessons, we still reached the goal of 20 lessons. No one in our zone (the baleric islands) has had 20 lessons for a long time. At least for a month or so. So that was good that we were able to do that to hopefully set a standard and help other people get motivated to do the same. We´ll see what we can do though. We had a bunch of crazy stories, one being with a guy named Marco. Marco is from Nigeria and things were going really well with him. We visited him several times last week, but the last time he was just crazy. He was telling us his pastor was the Jesus of our time and the savior and that he (Marco) was a prophet and that he´d lived on the earth before and had been sent back to preach about his pastor. So yeah, that was kind of lame losing an investigator, but I guess now´s not his time. We found a few new investigators as well, including a family from Bolivia. So we´ll see how everything goes with all of that. As far as pictures go, there´s no place to stick the memory card in the computer, so you´ll have to wait another week for more pictures. I have a bunch of pictures you´ll have to see though. I need to just make a DVD and send it to you. Okay, so I´m still in Barcelona because of the new lessons that are coming out to help missionaries with Preach My Gospel. What the General Authorities have asked that they do in every mission is train all the leaders in the mission starting now, so that in a year when new missionaries come having learned these lessons from the MTC that we´ll already know them. They´re not new lessons, but they´re lessons to help us use Preach My Gospel better. Things like "The Doctrine of Christ," "The Role of the Holy Ghost in Conversion," "Reverlation through Prayer," "Revelation through the Book of Mormon," "Revelation through Church Attendance," "Teach People, Not Lessons," "We Invite, They Commit, We Follow Up," and "How to Begin Teaching." Those are the 8 lessons. It´s really nothing new, it´s all in Preach My Gospel. They´re just putting a big emphasis on it though. It´s good. We´ve gone through the first 5, and we have 3 more to go tomorrow. It gives me headaches though just because we´re sitting down from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. with only a couple breaks, but it´s alright. Okay, so now the big news... I got to go to Vilafranca yesterday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And even better, I went with Elder Morales!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We were super lucky. It ended at 4, and both of our areas are far, so they were just going to have everyone who had traveled into Barcelona stay in Barcelona and work, but Elder Morales asked if we could go out there, and Elder Jacinto too, and they let us. So I saw Pilar again, Josué, Susana, Karlita (the first person I actually baptized), and Abraham. It was so fun. What was crazy is that I stil remembered the area perfectly, including which doorbell I had to push, like for the floor and door. It was really cool. I really feel at home there. Also, I figured out I´ll have to go back to Castellón in a few weeks probably for residency things since I was empodronized there. But yeah. It was a ton of fun being in Vilafranca again. I loved it. I can´t wait to be able to go back to all my areas and see everyone. I´d love to live in Spain actually for a year or two sometime after my mission, but we´ll see what happens. Anyways, so yeah, that was a lot of fun, and I got a bunch of pictures with all of them. Okay, so a little about Concilio (the meeting with the zone leaders and President and Hermana Hinckley), that was really cool. We actually have a big say in how we do things in the mission. President Hinckley just brought up topics, then we´d talk about it. For example, when we should wake up and go to bed, because they were doing it slightly different in Bilbao and our mission is now a mixture of the two missions. But we all gave our opinions, then came up with what we should do. It was cool. We also all had to give little presentations on our zones too, and that went well too. Our zone is good, but we need to improve. But that´s alright, we can always be improving. Well, things are going great here. I hope everything´s going well there. I´m going to end this though and write the individual´s now. Have a fantastic week. -Elder Ryan Sommerfeldt