Week 15 in San Sebastian

Hello Everyone!!!

 

It has been a really long and rainy week and our preparation day greeted us with the sun...finally!!!! It has been raining pretty much nonstop all week. Pretty depressing. There is a girl in our ward here that is from England and she says that this is so much worse than it is in London. But even with the rain, San Sebastian is still incredibly gorgeous. 

 

We have had some interesting miracles and other great things happen this week. We have really just been working our butts off like crazy and have really been seeing the fruits of lots of that work. It has been really great. 

 

Our investigator Saul is still going to be baptized on the 7th of November and even though it is on a Wednesday, the whole ward is going to do all they can to make it happen on a Wednesday. So we are really excited about that. 

 

We also were able to set a baptismal date goal with our investigator Juan. He is our investigator that has been coming to church forever but did not want to meet with the missionaries at all. Well, with lots of help from our wonderful ward mission leader, we were able to meet with him and we had a really great and powerful lesson with him. He is going to try to prepare to be baptized on the 17 of November. He is really a great guy. He just has some holdups with committing to anything until he knows everything about it. So he has about a million questions about our church and Joseph Smith and doesn´t want to do anything until he receives all that information, so it is really amazing that he was able to set a goal date. 

 

We are in the process of tracking down all the Less-active members in our ward and visiting all of them. The process is long and hard, but we are making our way through our ward list. I ended up having to give a talk in church this last Sunday. I knew more or less what I wanted to say, but not all of it came out. I wasn´t supposed to speak until this next Sunday, but since one of the speakers didn´t show up, they asked me to do it right then. It turned out fine because luckily the spirit did as it promises and gave me all the things to say. It is amazing how that happens. I love the power of the Spirit.

Well, we found some new investigators this week. We were passing by old investigators and this one house just let us up without even asking who was there. So they invited us in and we had an amazing lesson about the Book of Mormon. The woman, Sonia, could basically recount the whole Restoration to us, but she did not understand the need for the Book of Mormon and said that she was fine with just the Bible. So after we had a really powerful lesson about the Book of Mormon, she said that she really understood and was intrigued by it and wanted to start reading it. Her and her husband Hernan seem really open and we are excited to keep teaching them. 

 

It was a very busy week, and this week is looking even busier. Wish us luck! And
keep Saul, Juan, Sonia, and Hernan in your prayers. 

 

Talk to you all next week. 

 

Love always,

Hermana Eyre

Week 12 in San Sebastian

Hello everyone! 

How are you all this week? I hope you are all doing well. Things here have been a little crazy this last week, but still very fun. My companion Hermana Farrell was just transferred to my old area in Hospitalet and I am just about to head back up to San Sebastian with my new companion, Hermana Lichfield. We don´t really know anything about each other yet, but I am sure we will soon. What I know so far is that she is from Hurricane, Utah and has 3 sisters and 4 brothers. She was just serving in Benidorm where my companion Hermana Farrell had come from only one transfer before I got to San Sebastian. It is crazy! This particular transfer is nuts. Everyone got moved around to really unexpected places and no one saw any of the companionship changes coming. But from what we hear, the next two transfers will be really nuts because there are lots of missionaries waiting to come into the mission that are waiting just because of more major visa issue problems that everyone has been having. So they are expecting to get a flood of missionaries in December I think. 

Well, this last week we were able to visit about half the ward again and continue with our project with the bishopric to strengthen the ward up there in San Sebastian. We also got a surprise visit from Hermana Farrell´s parent´s friends that live next door to her family in California. They took us out for a nice lunch and were such nice and genuine people. 

San Sebastian has also been crazy this last week filled with tons of tourists because of the big film festival that is going on up there right now. All of the sudden, the streets were filled with people that were dressed up quite nice, walking around town. Usually it was filled with people that were heading down to the beach. But not this last week...it seems like everyone felt the need to be dressed up really nice just in case they ran into a moviestar. Very interesting. They were already up and about when we would go running in the morning which is definitely new. 

Well, you will all be happy to hear that our incredible investigator, Saul, had his baptismal interview and he is great to go as soon as he decides to do it. He is still kind of set on getting baptized on November 7th because it is his birthday...but it is also a Wednesday and the bishop told us that it needs to be on a Saturday. So we are hoping that he will choose a day a little bit sooner to do so. It seriously is incredible to have seen the absolute change that has taken place in him from when I first got to this area. I am so proud of him, and so grateful for the power of the spirit and how it touched him. He is already a new man, husband, and father. His wife is just absolutely ecstatic about the change that has taken place in him. He is being a great example right now of faith overcoming fear, because for the last 6 years of him being an investigator, the thing that kept holding him up was fear of change and fear that he would really mess things up after being baptized. But, with a lot of work and effort on his part (the most important part about our work is that God expects people to do their part to find their own answers), he has come to really know for himself,  the truth and the power that the Atonement is going to have on his life when he is baptized. He has worked hard to really gain a witness from the spirit that the church is true, that the Book of Mormon is true, and that we have prophets on the earth today that hold the priesthood authority to guide and direct Christ´s church. He has put in that effort to read and pray every day, and to faithfully attend church every Sunday, even though he has to get 3 kids, ages 3 and under, ready for church by himself, and take them all there by himself because his wife works on Sunday. In turn, Heavenly Father blessed him with so many incredible experiences with the spirit that he really knows it all. We are looking forward with great anticipation to his baptism in the coming weeks. 

I want you all to know how much I love you and how much I know that we indeed have the same and complete church that Jesus Christ established when he was on the earth. That it was restored by Jesus Christ to the earth, through the prophet Joseph Smith, that he called and gave the authority to do so. We have living a living prophet and apostles on the earth today and we have the opportunity to listen to them this weekend. That is an invitation to come and listen to God and Jesus Christ, because they are the mouthpieces for them on the earth today. I hope you will all take the opportunity to attend, or watch, or listen to Conference this weekend, because in a world and in our country where it seems like everything is falling apart right now, we really need the guiding hand of God to help us through what will likely be very hard times in the near future. 

I love you all and am grateful for all your love and support. 

Have a wonderful week!

Love,

Hermana Eyre

 Hermana Farrell´s next door neighbors from home were in town and surprised us by showing up in San Sebastian. They were staying in the only 5 star hotel in San Sebastian and we were able to grab some quick lunch with them and see their crazy hotel room with a much larger than a California King bed. This also happens to be the Hotel where a bunch of movie stars were staying at the time because there was a film festival going on in San Sebastian this last week.

 the view from our walk back from lunch. Beautiful!

 We were walking home from our last appointment and a big crowd was gathered around the big theater or hall where they are doing all the film festival stuff, and they were all waiting for whichever movie star was coming. 5 minutes later, we found out who it was. It is the guy kind with the beard. Can anyone guess who it was?

 The missionaries going home today. My first companion, Hermana Reeder, is included in them. This was at the big "singing with the angels" that our mission does at the end of every transfer for those going home.

 all the Hermanas in our mission minus 4 that were still in their areas for lack of being moved.

the 7 sister missionaries that got stuck in the elevator in the building where the Hospitalet sisters live now on our way back from "singing with the angels". The limit was 6 and we were 7. It was significantly bigger than all the other elevators here in Spain for that many people, so we didn´t even realize that we were over the limit. But the nice President of the building got us out in about 15 minutes.