Email 55 - The Spectacular Hike to Roque Nublo

"My area, Las Palmas :)"

"The international dinner (complete with some typical Latin American dancers! ...nonmembers. Hence the arm around me in the photo, haha)" 

"The hike to Roque Nublo. Complete with a double-district selfie, haha."

"Double District Selfie"

Elder and Sister Larsen 

"The best missionary couple ever, folks!"

    

Our district goodbyes- Elder Shumway´s heading home, Elder Thunnel´s headed to the other side of the island (same district, different area), and Elder McWhorter´s headed to Madrid after spending a year away from the temple! If you look at my shots from the flight over to Spain, Elder McWhorter´s the Elder asleep on my right, hahaha. 

"Feeling the love from home! :)"

Hey, folks!

We got transfer calls on Saturday, and Hna Irigoyen and I are stickin´ around for another transfer in Las Palmas! Woohoo!

We´re actually losing quite a few missionaries this transfer (a big group just finished their missions), so some of the districts are shrinking down. Our district now has two companionships fewer, and now, instead of just being Las Palmas, our district includes the whole island (that means an hour commute to each district meeting!). Lots of changes.

We´ve got a LOT we still need to do here, so I´m glad we´re getting the chance to do it! I still feel like we´re almost to the point of seeing a lot of major miracles in our area, but for now, we´re still fighting to see progression in our current investigators and keeping up the search for newbies. 

Thanks a ton, Mom for the talks you sent and the little package! Those M&Ms are just about gone already, haha. Perfect timing, as always. :) We´ve been listening to that disc everyday, I´m a big fan of the new EFY music.

So this biggest issue this week was canceled appointments. It´s becoming the "norm" to go 2 weeks inbetween visits with most of our investigators. It´s really frustrating because they´re so so close to progressing, but it´s obviously tough to progress in the Gospel if you keep leaving on vacation and getting sick and having all kinds of other legitimate excuses that keep us from meeting, haha.

We have been able to see Y-----a quite a bit, though, and she accepted a baptismal date!!! There had been a lot of issues keeping her from accepting one before, so it´s been kind of a touchy subject that we´ve been careful with. And then, when it came up in the last visit, my companion just said, "Soooo... why are you waiting?" and she, surprisingly, said, "Y´know, I don´t know. I feel ready now."

Her date´s set for the end of this month, but I think we´ll end up bumping it forward :)

Other than that, there´s really not much to tell this week. I wish I had more updates- but we haven´t been able to see people so I´m wondering how they´re doing myself! Haha.

But the activity we had on Friday, the International Dinner, went really well. We had a LOT of people show up, and all of the members were wonderful and brought their typical foods and we all had fun. In every area I´ve been in, the members have complained about not having enough activities, so it´s been a goal for me to have a ward activity every transfer. Any ideas for this transfer? :)

And I´ve been reading the talks Mom sent, and I especially loved one titled, "Healing = Courage + Action + Grace" by Jonathan G. Sandberg. It was cool seeing how applicable his counsel is for everything from healing from an abusive past to taking the next step wherever you are in the conversion process. This was one of my favorite parts:

"If Satan can convince us that our fear is too great to be able to act or that to act is a great idea but we should do it later, he can prevent us from opening the door to grace."

And the perfection, or "healing" process is, like what Tad R. Callister said, really just about aquiring spiritual gifts. But without that grace that Satan tries to prevent us from receiving, we can run ourselves ragged (sheer grit, remember?) trying to develop gifts of knowledge or discernment or street-contacting without ever becoming "partakers of the divine nature" simply because we alone don´t have the capacity to do so. Here´s part of what Elder Callister said:

"Our embrace of the Atonement opens up a new cache of spiritual powers that "add upon" and endow man with godly traits that he cannot generate from internal sources alone."

Basically, we really depend much more on God than I ever really realized! We´re not asked to do this on our own, because we don´t even have the capacity to do so!

I´ll be keeping that in mind as we keep doing what we can to get this area reaching the potential it´s got!

I sure love you guys!!! Have another great week. And tell me all about it :)

Love,

Hna Grover