Email 40 - Sunny is Baptized! And Reaction to Michael and Alicia's Engagement!

"...the best baptismal service I´ve ever been to..."

 Thanks for the package, Mom!!!!

Easter morning :)

FHE with Noslen, Elder Mullins, me, Hna P, Ana and her nephew, Antonio, Sunny, Elder Helske, and Norma

"Correos- they make the sending/ receiving of Grover love through mail possible, haha. Anytime I have mail to send, I stick it in one of these suckers."

Toledo!

So wet.

"I don´t know what any of these buildings are...."

"picnic :)"

"Toledo swords!"

HELLOO MOUNTAINS* (I mean family!)

Mike´s engaged!!! Alicia´s gonna be a Grover!!! (Hope she likes charades... ;)

That is awesome.

I´m not sure I can top that with my week here in Madrid!

And Happy Easter er´ybody! Thanks for the awesome package, Mom!!!! I had fun explaining all the traditions to Hna P. We´re going to dye us some eggs this week with R-----o and V-------a :) Everyone here in Spain has a LOT of traditions and celebrations for all of Semana Santa, as they remember the suffering of the Savior, but the curious thing is that they really don´t do much of anything for Easter. They don´t even change anything in the stores! (which is saying something... seeing as no one really does anything for Father´s day here, either, but that showed up in all of the shop windows). Interesting, huh?

We just got back to our area from a visit to the BEAUTIFUL old city of Toledo. It´s been sunny and hot all week, and then it was suddenly really wet and chilly today, haha. At least the weather kept the majority of the tourists away :)

We had a lot of fun getting wet and hiking around all of the really old, gorgeous buildings... although, I´ll admit, I really don´t know what the significance of any of them are, haha. I just know that they´re really old, gorgeous buildings... and that´s it, haha. Photo worthy, right? 

I´ll repent of my wrong-doings and study up before I come back to visit this place again someday, haha.

Anyway, I didn´t get a chance to look over my planner to make sure I get all the good stuff in my email this week, but here´s the best part:

Sunny got baptized!!!!

We had the best baptismal service I´ve ever been to. And no, not the best like you might think. It was more like this: about 15 people in attendance, not a single one of us 8 missionaries sang on-pitch during our musical number (no really, it was pretty awful), Sunny having to get dunked twice, and a couple other thrown-together details, but the Spirit was SO STRONG. We only had a few programs, but everyone that was there took one home to remember the service and thanked us as they left for finding and teaching Sunny.

Sunny was baptized for exactly the right reasons. He testified at the end of his baptism of the Savior, of the truthfulness of the Gospel, and the importance of and his love for the Church. He started crying, and people from both sides rushed to the pulpit with tissues. He already seems to know more people in the stake than we do, and he´s already rockin´ it as a strong member. We are VERY blessed missionaries. I´m still not sure what we´ve done to deserve getting to teach this guy. I hope you guys get to meet him someday. He speaks English :)

I also had an intercambio over near the Plaza de Torros (really pretty area) on Friday with sweet, greenie Hna Pávez from Argentina. My first exchange as STL. ´Coolest part about exchanges is how much both missionaries learn from the 24 hours you´re together. Hna Pávez is the best, and her area has SO much potential. It was awesome teaching with her. We met a surfer who knew all about Cocoa Beach and Uncle Matt :)

Some other fun things from this week:

-So we´ve been working on Hna Palomino´s English in the Metro, right? Apparently it caught a lady´s attention, because she came up to me a few days later in the streets and said, "Hey, you were teaching her English in the Metro the other day, right? Can I pay you to help my son with his English?" She was pretty excited to hear that it was free and we´d be delighted to help her son with his homework. I love being a missionary!

-As we walked around in the heat, Hna P and I decided it was about time we started getting into shape before it gets any hotter. We decided we´d plan a diet. Literally just moments later, we walk into an appointment where the sweet member had taken a HUGE loaf of french bread, cut it in half, and stuck 4 hotdog sausages in each half, and gave one to each of us. Haha, so with that little taste of mission-life reality, we decided to throw that idea out the window. We were fed hotdogs two other times this week. 

-I got to have a short interview with President Jackson :) Always so, so great to see him and his wife. She gave us cookies made with American brown sugar. Mmmmm. They also told us how President Jackson signed up to sell "student survival kits" on BYU campus when he was a student there, and got called into President Oak´s office and was almost expelled because, much to his surprise, the kits contained coffee. Hahaha. He had to respond to all of the parent´s complaint letters personally. Hermana Jackson had a lot of fun telling us that story.

It was a pretty awesome week :) I´m so grateful for the Resurrection of the Savior and all that means for us. I loved what D Todd Christofferson said about this:

Consider for a moment the significance of the Resurrection in resolving once and for all the true identity of Jesus of Nazareth and the great philosophical contests and questions of life. If Jesus was in fact literally resurrected, it necessarily follows that He is a divine being. No mere mortal has the power in himself to come to life again after dying. Because He was resurrected, Jesus cannot have been only a carpenter, a teacher, a rabbi, or a prophet. Because He was resurrected, Jesus had to have been a God, even the Only Begotten Son of the Father.

Therefore, what He taught is true; God cannot lie.²⁵Therefore, He was the Creator of the earth, as He said.²⁶Therefore, heaven and hell are real, as He taught.²⁷Therefore, there is a world of spirits, which He visited after His death.²⁸Therefore, He will come again, as the angels said,²⁹ and “reign personally upon the earth.”³⁰Therefore, there is a resurrection and a final judgment for all.³¹

Given the reality of the Resurrection of Christ, doubts about the omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence of God the Father—who gave His Only Begotten Son for the redemption of the world—are groundless. Doubts about the meaning and purpose of life are unfounded. Jesus Christ is in fact the only name or way by which salvation can come to mankind. The grace of Christ is real, affording both forgiveness and cleansing to the repentant sinner. Faith truly is more than imagination or psychological invention. There is ultimate and universal truth, and there are objective and unchanging moral standards, as taught by Him.

Christ lives! I´m grateful to be one of his "soldiers," as Sunny has begun to call us :) I´m grateful for the Everlasting Gospel, the new temple in Florida, and for the addition to our eternal family!

I love you guys tons!

Love,

Hna Grover

*(editor:  "Hello mountains!" is a reference to the clumsy code phrase Bob yelled to best bud Steve Brayton, when Steve lit a camp fire near Mount Timp where Bob would propose to Melissa.)