Week 18 in San Sebastian and transfer to Barcelona!

Hello everyone!!!!

 

What an incredibly fantastic week it has been!!! Saul got baptized on November 7th and was confirmed a member of the church on Sunday, November 11th. His baptismal service was so special and it meant the whole world to me to be able to see his baptism and confirmation before leaving my beautiful, most favorite area ever, of San Sebastian. Which brings me to the second part of my news. I got transferred. I am now serving in the Barcelona 1st ward. I have heard really great things about it and it will be interesting to be back in Barcelona again. This will likely be my last area unless something wierd happens. So I am excited to be in a ward that I have heard so many great things about. 

 

It was incredibly hard to say goodbye to all the people in San Sebastian. I definitely was sad to say goodbye to the people in Hospitalet when I left there, but it was nothing like it was to leave San Sebastian. Those people are like my family and I would be super sad to leave them even if I was going home to my own family. But I will get to go visit them when my family comes to pick me up before I go home. I enjoyed my time up there like nothing else and felt incredibly privileged to have seen all the miracles up there. There are so many things that I will miss about that place, not the least of which is the incredible scenery and the cold weather and the list just goes on and on. 

 

So Saul was confirmed on Sunday and the primary also had a primary program on Sunday that was just absolutely incredibly cute. It was a good note to end on. Seeing Saul get confirmed though just topped the cake. I got pretty teary-eyed and am so excited that their family can now start preparing to go to the temple!

There is no better way to leave an area and a wonderful time in your mission.

I don´t have much more to explain than that...I think the pictures will do most of the talking. So enjoy. 

 

Love you all and talk to you soon!

Hermana Eyre

Week 17 in San Sebastian

Hello everone!

 

This is likely my last week here in San Sebastian...at least it feels like I am going to be transferred this next week...but we will see. If that is the case, I am really sad to go because I love this area with all my heart! The people are fantastic as well as everything else. It will be a good week regardless though. Saul is still going to be baptized on Wednesday and we are just absolutely thrilled about that! It will be a really neat baptismal service because all his kids and his wife are going to participate in the program. He is incredibly prepared and is a perfect example to me of how Heavenly Father really does not need us in or to do his work. He is the one that touched Saul´s heart and he has made all the changes necessary to take this step of baptism. We just taught the lessons (even though he already knows everything because he has been an investigator for 6 years). This is God´s work and it will never be any different than that. 

 

I spent this last week in Bilbao on companion exchanges. It was a very long exchange, (5 days, which is very unusual) but I really had a good time and learned a lot. And my companion here in San Sebastian, Hermana Lichfield, totally knows the area and the ward here well enough to show it to the next missionary that is going to come up here. We have actually been hoping that they will send another companionship up here to help with all the work. While we don´t have tons of investigators right now, the ward is just overflowing of less-active members that we are trying to visit and are more than willing to meet with us, but we just don´t have sufficient time to meet with all of them. 

 

The weather has still been changing here quite drastically. It was pretty cold and we thought we were headed into winter, but then this whole last week it was quite warm and it just barely started cooling off again. The leaves here are starting to change finally...but it is not quite the same as Utah. We were grateful for the change of daylight savings, because now we are not running in the complete dark. 

 

Anyways...enough of my rambling. Things are going well here and I am looking forward to seeing what the next transfer is going to bring me. Thank you all for the great support that I receive from you. You all mean the world to me and everything that I hear from each of you just keeps me going out here. This is the most important work and I feel privileged to have the opportunity to be out here and participating in it. If any of you reading this have ever wanted to serve and are on the fence about it...come out and do it! You will never regret it!

 

I love you all!

Talk to you next week!

 

Love,

Hermana Eyre

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. 

Week 10 & 11 in San Sebastian

Hello everyone!

 

It has been a happening 2 weeks and I hope that it has been so for you as well. Last week we did a companionship exchange for two days. I stayed here in San Sebastian and Hermana Farrell went to Bilbao. We visited tons of members in those few days and the whole rest of the week and we are continuing our intense work and project with the members. When we finish, I am pretty sure that the work is just going to explode here. We have already seen many evidences of that already and we continue to see more and more. There is a cold that seems to be going around here in San Sebastian and we have both ended up with it a couple times, but it doesn´t seem to slow anything down luckily. 

 

Well, I don´t have tons of time to tell all the details this week, but I do want to share our very incredible preparation day experience. 

 

So we hiked the mountain that we wanted to hike, and without the help of anyone in our ward. It was pretty funny...everyone that we mentioned it too was very doubtful of our abilities to do it, and they were all super worried that we would die or something. So we hiked Peñas de Aia. It is an incredibly gorgeous mountain and was the highest mountain I have been able to see around here and I wanted to hike it. So we made our way to the town that comes nearest to it in the train and then walked towards it on beautiful pathways next to the river. When we got closer, we were able to find a trail, although it was not the one we originally were planning to go to, because we got some misleading directions from a person on the road. But we made our way up and up until we came to a place where there were some cars parked and we weren´t entirely sure which trail to take from there. Just as we got to that point, a man came up the other side of the mountain and we asked him if he knew which trail to take to get to the top. He said he would show us and hike the rest of the way up with us. He was a really nice guy and when we got to the top we started discussing the gospel with him. We ended up teaching him for about an hour. He didn´t end up being very interested, but I definitely feel it was a seed that needed to be planted...because all the timing in the morning had worked out in the morning and we ended up in the complete opposite trail of which we had intended when we set out. But we decided to go back down the way that we had intended to come up and were able to get down to the road that led back to the town where we took the train back to San Sebastian. On that road a family picked us up that was going back into town. They were very nice but do not believe in God at all, but we had a really great lesson with them in the car on the way back and hopefully someday that seed will bloom and grow. But there were too many things that just happened in the perfect timing that led us to those two people while we were on our preparation day adventure that it is so incredible for us to see the hand of God working in all things out here. It is God´s work and if he needs us to just plant a lot of seeds that will be harvested much later, he will lead us to do it. Both Hermana Farrell and I felt the promptings of the spirit each time that we were choosing which way we should go and it really was an incredible day. Plus...it didn´t hurt at all that we climbed the most beautiful mountain that we can even see around here. What a great day!

 

Well, we are having great success with Saul, our investigator that is preparing for baptism right now. He has told us so many times how he can literally feel all his desires changing and he is being touched more and more by the spirit every day as he continues to read his scriptures everyday, pray everyday, and attend church each week. It is so incredible to be a part of the work of Heavenly Father. There is no bigger miracle to see than to see Heavenly Father´s children change and desire to be closer to him. I love it!

 

Well that is about all I have for you this week!

 

Love you all,

Hermana Eyre

Week 9 in San Sebastian

Hello everyone!

 

San Sebastian is still just as beautiful as ever and we just had a wonderful Zone Conference yesterday. We have such an amazing mission here in the Spain Barcelona mission. The missionaries are incredible, the people are incredible and our leaders, emphasis on our mission President and his wife, are seriously incredible!

Some wonderful news that we have this week is first off...that our ward mission leader is doing well. He is out of the Hospital and went to the temple in Madrid yesterday to be sealed to his incredible wife. Such a good ending to the story. He made sure to use his time wisely in the Hospital in sharing a bit about the Gospel with the patient that was in the bed next to him for the whole 10 days! Seriously incredible man. 

 

Second, an incredible man that we have been meeting with...his name is Saul. He has been an investigator of the church for 6 years. His wife is a member as well as his daughter that is 15. He has 3 younger daughters as well that are 5, 2, and 18 months. They are seriously the cutest family that I have met since I got here to Spain and I just adore his little girls! They just love us and come running up to us with their arms wide open whenever we come over! It is the best! But anyways...the good news is that he has finally made the decision to be baptized after 6 years. The date is still a little ways off right now, but he has really actually started changing this time. His wife has been astounded at the change and he really finally feels like it is his time and finally wants to take that step so that he can work toward being sealed to his family in the temple. Keep him in your prayers please. I love this family and would love to be able to see them sealed in the temple next year. While he has finally made the decision to be baptized, he still is a little scared. But he has had a lot of spiritual confirmations this week that he should be baptized. 

 

We are still working hard with the ward members to strengthen them and trying to re-activate the in-active members. This place is filled with such incredible people and they all just need the love of our Savior. So we are working hard with the bishopric to help this ward get strengthened and have a strong foundation. 

 

We are still working with Juan and Lucresia. Juan is having a hard time because he really wants to know all the inside workings of the church before he makes a decision to be baptized, but we are making progress and helping him to understand what is necessary, but he and Lucresia could use your prayers as well. 

 

Well, That is all I have time for this week. Until next week!

 

Love you all,

Hermana Eyre

Week 8 in San Sebastian

Hello family and friends!

It is crazy that it is already September! Time is oh so strange out here...so fast and so slow. Things have been pretty interesting here this week. Our ward mission leader 

went to the emergency room last Monday and has been in the Hospital ever since. Before he knew the church he led a pretty rough lifestyle of drinking and drugs. He 

has said many times that it is a huge miracle that he didn´t actually die with the lifestyle he had. But he was landed in the hospital last week with the delayed effects of that lifestyle. He has severe pancreatitis. He basically almost died. He had to drive himself to the hospital on his motorcycle in severe pain. He could hardly breathe and he couldn´t walk by the time he got to the hospital, so he crawled in. He couldn´t talk by that time and all he could do was point to his inflamed stomach. Things 

looked pretty bleak for the first few days, but he is doing much better now thanks to all the fervent prayers of everyone in our ward and the priesthood blessings that he received. He is so grateful for that. According to the doctors orders, he is going to have to be going on a strict diet for the rest of his life, which is basically the Word of Wisdom to the extreme, and cuts out all animal products, any sugar or sugar substitutes, etc. Basically anything that puts any strain on the liver and any other organs to digest. He is quite devastated about that but is very grateful to be alive. But he feels like he is going to be paying for his past lifestyle for the rest of his life.  He is such an incredible man though and we are really grateful that our prayers were answered and that he is well on his way to recovering.

Well, besides that, things here are pretty good. We have several incredible people that we are working with and trying to work with to get them ready for baptism this month and with patience and faith, they will get there.

The weather here in San Sebastian is to the point where we never know when it is going to rain. It will be perfectly sunny and 5 minutes later, a torrential downpour. But it is nice to have a little bit cooler weather heading our way.

I am happy to let you all that I have finally received my package that I have been waiting on for about 2 months. I don´t think I mentioned much about it before, but it was the most complicated and expensive process that I have ever been through in my life. Spain was definitely being difficult. We were never able to get a complete answer on what I needed to do to get it and I went throught the same process for a solid month. To say the least...the package arrived in Spain in mid-July...but they held it in Madrid and sent me many things and stuff saying that I had to do this and this and this....it was very frustrating... But...I finally have it!

Well...That is about all I have time for right now. We would love your prayers here for the work and for the whole mission! There is a lot to be accomplished here in this mission.

Well...hasta luego!

Love,

Hermana Eyre

 

 The big road that wraps around the Jesus mountain covered with amusement park rides and games

 One of the fun amusement park rides that we went on for Semana Grande. Hermana Farrell got feeling a little woozy...but I loved it! Especially looking out at the ocean...it felt like I was flying and the whole world turned sideways...really great sensation.

Me on the ride, waiting to start,that is the equivalent of the Samurai at Lagoon. So fun!

 Me after getting off of the ride that is the equivalent to the Samurai at Lagoon

 An interesting but the best picture I had of the fireworks. I got lots of good video but it is too big to send through email.

 Hermana Farrell´s Birthday breakfast. Compliments of Chef Eyre. Crepes and ice cream.

 

 Hermana Farrell and Dalleli at our birthday lunch after church. Dalleli´s birthday was a week before.

 The whole group at our birthday lunch. Our ward mission leader is on the left and not smiling...but this was about 12 hours before he ended up in the hospital.

 The mountain that we actually want to hike. Called Peñas de Aia. Gorgeous! We will keep you updated.

 Missionaries in our zone before the birthday brownies.

 Hermana Farrell´s Birthday brownies from the missionaries in our zone.