Email 47 - Very Sunny, With a Chance of International Tourists!

"Dinner with a family in the ward :)"

"Picture of a picture of our P-day in Tenerife :)"

"That´s N-----a in the middle, and her friend D----e on the right :) LOVE these two!"

Hey family!! ´Glad to hear that summer vacation´s off to a good start :) Thanks, as always, for the awesome photos!! I´m hoping everything´s still going smoothly with Mike´s animation application, and I´m glad things turned out as well as they did with the interview Dad had with the General Authorities- that´s so intense!

We´ve been very busy this week. It´s been very sunny, and tourists from all over the place are showing up with their big city maps and confused expressions, haha (I laugh... but that´ll be us when we come back to visit someday!). We always try to lend a hand with directions when we hear English :)

We´re also hustling to plan our activity we´ve got this Saturday, with two goals in mind: 1. Get ALL the members to invite a friend and/or less-active, and 2. Make the Plan of Salvation as real as possible. We´re doing an activity that every here seems familiar with, where we "simulate" a plane crash and then guide everyone through the Plan of Salvation. ´Should be pretty awesome if we can pull it off.

In other news, we ate with an Argentinian family this week, and after the meal, they asked us what we thought it was we´d just eaten. After answering "chicken," they told us it was rabbit. Haha. It was very, very tasty.

Anyway, I guess we scared C------e and P---a a little with the baptismal date, and F----o misinterpreted a comment from Hermana Caballero at church yesterday and got offended, so all three of them have asked us to set aside their baptismal dates. That´s been a very humbling experience for our trio, but we´re definitely learning a lot from it! I guess maybe we´ve been pushing things a little hard because we all have Hna C´s rapidly approaching release date in mind, so now we´re really trying to be more sensitive to the Spirit as we plan lessons and set baptismal goals. We´re definitely going to take things slower with these three for now.

A few weeks ago, we had a really neat mutual with the Young Women where we challenged them to all write a short list of friends/family members with whom they´d like to share the Gospel. The challenge is to pray specifically for them each day for 21 days, and the promise is that at least one of them will be prepared to receive the Gospel. The idea was taken originally from a talk by R.E. Wells of the 70, and it´s come to be known as the "member missionary covenant," here in the mission.

Anyway, one of the girls, D----e, has been praying for her friend, N-----a, and in the last 8 days, she´s come to church twice and we´ve had two AWESOME lessons with her!!! (editor:  see photo above)

The Gospel seems to become so pure, simple and so perfect as we teach kids. N-----a is 12, and she understands the importance of what we´re teaching her like almost no other investigator I´ve ever taught. We continue teaching 8-yr-old A----a (whose baptism is this Friday!), and although she was a little stubborn about leaving coffee at first (She´s 8, and addicted to coffee...), she´s been doing great!

We had an incredible consejo del barrio (ward council) this week, and the bishop told us that a new chapel for Las Palmas is on the way!! He said that we need to jump from an attendance of about 130 to 200, and he gave us a game plan. He said that every organization was going to give each of the missionary companionships 5 families to visit a month, to see if they´ll accept visits from HTs/VTs or the ward leaders. I´m STOKED. There are 327 inactive members in Relief Society alone, and we´re going to get them coming to church again.

So as we´ve started with some of these less-active families, we´ve been focusing a lot on the importance of the sacrament. With every appointment we´ve had, the sacrament´s been becoming much more significant for me, too. Almost everytime, I share this quote from a few conferences ago from Sister Reeves:

"Why does the Savior put so much importance upon the sacrament, dear sisters? What importance does this weekly renewal of our baptismal covenants play in our lives? Do we recognize the ability of the Savior to completely cleanse us every week as we worthily and thoughtfully partake of the sacrament? 

President Boyd K. Packer has testified, “That is the promise of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Atonement: … that at the end of [our lives, we] can go through the veil having repented of [our] sins and having been washed clean through the blood of Christ.”

We began reading the Book of Mormon with M---a J--é, one of these less-actives, and she was surprised to hear that the family of Lehi lived 600 years before Christ. "They prophesied about the Messiah 600 years before He came??" That gave us a perfect opportunity to testify of the importance of the Atonement for every single one of God´s children, its infinite and eternal nature, and of the blessing it is to be able to apply it more fully each week with the sacrament. :)

I also had an interesting opportunity to talk about Mike´s mission with a recent convert we´re working with named A--x. He asked to meet with us, and told us his plans to leave the church for a time to investigate the Buddhist religion and the Asian culture in general. We taught him about his covenants for a while, and then the Spirit told me to take out the photo I carry in my scriptures of our family in front of the church in Thailand. I testified of the work Mike was doing over there, and the importance of the Gospel for every single one of God´s children. It was a really interesting, and a really spiritual lesson.  A--x left with the same intentions to investigate Buddhism, but I know we gave him something to think about.

Anyway, our trio is still doing great. Hna C´s headed home in TWO WEEKS which is crazy, but she´s still working as hard as ever! I don´t think I´m ever going to stop learning from these two...

Sorry this was such a sporadic email, but I love you guys so much!!!! I hope you all have a great week :) Keep sending me updates on everything!

Love,

Hna Grover

PS- Now that my companions have discovered my recording device, for better or for worst, everything is being recorded, haha.