1/17/11

That sounds like a mess, but also about what I expected. McVeigh got the death penalty, and I´m sure this bum will end up getting it too.

Oh dear...I´m going to have a box full of gravy mix. Hopefully you taped up all the seams. They do have peanut butter here, but it´s like $6 for a small jar, and it´s not very well made either. Silly Spaniards and their lack of culture change. You could open up a Baskin Robbins here and have it fail.

I was looking closely at the shoes this week. They´re holding up really well so far. No signs of any cracks or splitting in the soles yet, and the shoes are still in good shape. Keeping them polished helps the leather from wearing out too fast. Plus switching them every day-most missionaries just end up wearing one pair and then ask why it´s destroyed within a year. Silly dopes.

It was a better week this week. All our investigators are finally back from vacation, so we had a good amount of lessons. Now that Elder Close is gone, I´m the expert on the area, and I´m having to make sure people aren´t slipping through the cracks on both companionships. A recent convert family almost did, since Elder Benito hadn´t ever met them (long story) and they haven´t come to church in two months.

Elder Hansen is the new elder here in Tarragona. He´s having a rough time with Elder Benito. We´ve had to have a couple of late night talks with him just to get him to let some stress off. Benito´s training was just a disaster, and he´s absolutely lost on the area. Elder Hansen´s about to go home in three more transfers, so this is the last situation he wanted to end his mission. Elder Close did a really bad job with him-to the point that Elder Hansen´s thinking he´ll have to get President to step in and talk to him. He´s overly confused on the rules, sees all these contradictions that aren´t there, doesn´t listen to any of us when we try to correct him...yikes. Elder Hansen had talked to Elder Southwick, the former AP, and said that President had a feeling the trainers last transfer weren´t doing their job, and, well...he was right.

Weather´s been spectacular here. We were in slacks and short sleeves the whole week. They said it´s a little warmer than usual, so it´ll just be a dry summer.

We had some good lessons this week. We´d been teaching on and off some Seventh-Day Adventists. They were pretty much the confused Jews I expected them to be. But they weren´t progressing(and only wanted to argue how the Sabbath is on Saturday), so I finally set up a lesson to just hit them over the head with the Bible until they either agreed to change or we were going to drop them. Got in, I gave my little twenty minute lesson, read some scriptures, and by the end he was just absolutely furious. Talked about how he didn´t like to fight over the Bible (he´s been pulling stunts with it for weeks) and then tried to read some obsure Old Testament scripture about the Law of Moses. We ended up talking for about ten more minutes before they finally just gave up. We definately had some help in the lesson- both of us were just turning back every little thrust and hitting them with another question they couldn´t answer. It was a really good lesson, and we celebrated by buying churros afterwards (apostate moment ).

We´ve been working with that family we found last week. Kate is really starting to progress now, and Prince is finally fighting the desire to just stay at home and live an easier life. He´s been a member for seventeen years, though, and even three years of inactivity doesn´t change that. We had a separate Gospel Principles class in English for all the Africans and he was in there just throwing down all kinds of stuff. Deep level of comprehension.

All the Roman stuff here is closed on Mondays. I really don´t know why.(I don´t think it´s for family home evening) We´re still going to go one day and get some pictures at the very least.

Still working hard-we´re consistantly putting in some of the best numbers in the mission. If we can pull off these two baptisms we´ve got planned, it´ll be a really good transfer.

Emails are really only for the family. That´s all we really have time for anyway-we´re supposed to keep it to an hour, and I try my best to keep that. Maybe the box will work, but I hate people feeling obligated to write me.

Well, that´s all I have for the main letter. I´ve got little side letters to all of you to write.

Love,
Bradley.

3124 is of the whole mission (though a chunk of the first row has gone home already) and 26 is a picture I got from Elder Hansen.

So, I still have my study room.