Elder Adamson's Letter 1/26/2015

Hello everyone!  We have had another great and miraculous week.  Here´s how it went down.

Just as an update on our baptismal date setting week last week, the zone did an extra push this week and we now are at 29 fechas.  The original goal was 25 so we are very happy about that.  The Lord is blessing us a lot right now.  From the looks of it, we are going to have a good amount of baptisms in February.  We´ve got a lot of new missionaries here and we´re excited to have them.  My old companion Elder Enfield just came to Almería so he´s in the zone now, and Elder Buttars is training in Jaén.  I´ve had quite a few encounters with my former comps here.  They´re all doing really well,

The biggest highlight of the week has been Loveth.  Last week we had set a fecha with her for the 1st of February but we were teaching her on Tuesday and we found that she was VERY prepared and we changed her fecha to the 25th of January.  We taught her every day this week so that we could teach her everything before baptism and she was baptized last night after church.

  I wish you could have seen how happy she was yesterday.  Every time we talked about her baptism this week she would just tell us how excited that she was.  She even brought a friend named Sunny to church and we taught a class of Gospel Principles in English because there were 6 Nigerians at church yesterday.  The baptism came out great and Loveth is very happy.

This week in the mission we are going to have a day of pure street contacting called Día de Diamante (diamond day).  Our goal as a mission is get 2015 potential investigators to help us jumps start the year and lose our fear of man.  We´re excited and I´m sure that´s going to be a long day, but it will be great,

Last P-day Elder Metcalf and I went to Zara because all the super good sales are on after dia de los reyes and we both bought suits as late Christmas presents.  The other 20 euros was a watch that I bought, because the screen of my faithful casio broke.  So that´s what the charges on the card were.

Love you all and have a great week!

Elder Adamson

                                           Elder Adamson                      Elder Metcalf

Elder Adamson's Letter 1/19/2015

Hello everyone!  We have had another amazing week here in Granada and here´s what went down

This week in the zone we organized a week of setting baptismal dates. We started out the week with 9 fechas, but yesterday as we were counting up numbers we ended up with 21 which is pretty good for our zone.  We were super happy about it and we had a lot of fun working on it.  We sent out text messages every night to the zone to tell them how many fechas we had up until that day and how many more we needed.  Our goal was 25 but 21 ain´t too shabby.

This week we found a new investigator named Love-it.  She is from Nigeria and she is a very good and sincere investigator.  She lives here by herself with here 1 year old daughter and she is always very happy to receive us.  Most investigators will tell us to come over on another day if they aren´t feeling very well, but Love-it has let us come and visit her and has even walked to church in the rain with us.  She has some very pure desires to "Serve God" and she tells us that almost every time we meet.  She has a baptismal date for the 1 of February.

We are also teaching a man named Fran who should really actually already be baptized.  He is a former investigator that just kind of fell through the cracks a while ago.  He has come to church like 15 times and he has a pretty strong testimony already.  We set a fecha with him for the 25 of Jan, so we´re going to see what we can do to help him be baptized on that day.

This week I got to do another baptismal interview in Jaén.  It was about an hour drive out there but it´s really pretty.  The whole way there you can see mountains and hills just covered in olive trees--seriously as far as the eye can see.  I got to interview a 15 year old girl named Mari and she was very excited and ready to be baptized.  I will always love that part of being a missionary.

It has gotten really cold here recently and it rained a ton last night.  The Sierra Nevada is covered in snow and it´s super pretty.  I´m going to appreciate the Utah mountains so much more when I get home.  It´s been nice to see them here in Granada after being in super flat places for so long.

I hope you are all having a great week and I love you tons!

Con muchísimo cariño,  (With great affection,)

Elder Adamson

Elder Adamson's Letter 1/12/2015

Howdy! It´s been a great week.  I love Granada.

Since I emailed you on Tuesday last week you already know a good part of what I did, but here´s the rest of the highlights.

On Tuesday night we went out to the Bishop´s pueblo to have dinner with them.  They make some really good food.  We shared a little message about the new year and setting goals and I was on the floor pumping out pushups for the sake of a good demonstration.  (I did 40 by the way ;) )

This week we got to see Hilda.  She had a friend over this week who turned into a new investigator.  We had a great lesson with them.  Hilda lives in a pueblo that´s about 30 minutes away from Granada and there are no buses on Sunday mornings so she doesn´t really have a way to get to church but she´s asking around with all her friends so she can keep coming.  She told us that she spent 10 years of her life without the church and now that she´s found it again, she´ll never leave it.  I love to see such sincere and repentant people like her.  Meeting her has been one of the sweetest experiences of my mission.

This week I also got to do an intercambio with my trainer Elder Galarza.  He came to Granada after our zone meeting and we had a blast together.  We taught really well together and I had a great time being his companion again for a day.  When we went to make the change, I got to drive all the way out to Jaén and the drive is really beautiful.  Tons of olive trees and some really pretty mountains.

After we came home from the intercambio we had the opportunity to attend the funeral of a member of our ward.  We had just been in his house last Sunday to take him the sacrament and we were very thankful for the privilege that we had to be the ones to represent the Lord in allowing Federico to renew his covenants one more time in his earth life.  Taking the sacrament to members is always special.

This week I read in D&C 1 and there was a part that stuck out to me as I read.

19 The weak things of the world shall come forth and break down the mighty and strong ones, that man should not counsel his fellow man, neither trust in the arm of flesh—

 20 But that every man might speak in the name of God the Lord, even the Savior of the world;

 21 That faith also might increase in the earth;

 22 That mine everlasting covenant might be established;

 23 That the fulness of my gospel might be proclaimed by the weak and the simple unto the ends of the world, and before kings and rulers.

It isn´t a prerequisite to be a strong person to be able to share the gospel, and that is not what the Lord wants.  He will teach us over and over again, and I have learned over and over again that we must have weaknesses, but that with our humility and His help, we can overcome them and become strong, effective servants of the Lord.  All the Lord wants is for us to become better and more like Him, we just need to let Him mold us into more perfect children and heirs of our Heavenly Father.

I´ve attached some pictures of me and all the missionaries from my MTC group who were at concilio last week.

Elder Adamson's Letter 1/6/2015

Hello everyone!  This has been an amazing week and we´re off to a great start to a new year.  Here´s what went down.

This week we´ve been working a lot with the mormon.org referral that we received who was a less active member and her husband  (inv).  Things are going great with them and we were able to have two really great citas with them this week.  She came to church this Sunday for the first time in 10 years and she was so happy.  By the time we finished church, she wanted to take pictures with us in the capilla so that she could show her dad back in Bolivia that she is going to church again.  I´m so happy that we were able to find them.  Her husband is doing well and it looks like he´ll be baptized but just not very soon because he´s going to be gone for a long trip, but we are very pleased with the opportunity to be able to show her the way back to the church.  You can tell that she has missed it a lot.

On Tuesday night, we were walking through la Chana ( a neighborhood in Granada) and we had been all over the place that afternoon without teaching.  When we walked around the corner, I saw a family and we chased them down to go talk to them.  We asked them if we could share a Christmas message with them and they invited us into this piso.  Woooow.  A great way to end off the evening. 

On New Years eve we went to the Familia Ferrer´s house to eat lunch and had a great time with them and all the other missionaries there.  That night we went to the familia Morcote´s house to welcome in the New Year since we got permission to stay out.  We had a little party there, played some games and had a great dinner and we ate the 12 grapes at midnight as is the tradition here in Spain.

This week we've been teaching a man  who´s about 50 years old.  Teaching him is pretty hard but he really needs the gospel right now.  He´s already shown interest in being baptized so we´re going to keep working with him.  I´m sure I´ll have more to tell about him next week.

This week we were able to find 10 new investigators which is pretty good for a holiday week.  The Lord has really been blessing us.  We found a BIG family through a less active woman named Dulce and a few others.

We just got back from Concilio and we talked about our new focus in the mission for January.  We talked about how we need to focus ourselves on talking with more people and getting over the fear of man.  I´ll tell you more about all of this next week after we teach it at zone meeting.  We talked a lot about the scripture in 3 Nephi 5:13 that says

"Behold, I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I have been called of him to declare his word among his people, that they might have everlasting life."

We must always remember who we represent and the we are the only ones who have the authority to teach and baptize in His name and we must know that we have been called to do so.  

I love my calling and every day I learn to love it more.  The gospel is true.  Christ lives. I am His disciple.

How was your New Years Celebration?

       It was good but I´m still recovering from getting off my sleep schedule.
Have you finished off your jamon?

       Not even close.  It´s going to last a long time.  It was a great investment.
Have you seen "Meet the Mormons?

       Nope.  I don´t know if they've released it in Spanish yet...

Love you all and hope you had a happy new year!

Elder Adamson

Concilio 1/5/2015

Silly Picture - Elders Metcalf and Adamson on the top looking down.