Elder Adamson's Letter 4/27/2015

Hello hello!

This has been an awesome week.  I´m loving Cáceres even more than I did last week.  Here´s the week.

This week we have been meeting a lot with our investigators.  They are a mother and a son and they are golden.  P. has already been taught everything she needs to know and we´re teaching S. the lessons right now.  We had a really good lesson with them about the plan of salvation and after a long talk about baptism, we set a fecha with them for the 9th of May.  We´re praying hard for them.

We also set a baptismal date with an investigator from Honduras.  She was a referral from our ward mission leader.  She also has a date for the 9th of May and the only thing in her way right now is that she needs to stop drinking coffee, so we made a little calendar for her to help.

This weekend we had an activity with the branch and we watched Meet the Mormons.  All the members loved it.  We got S. to come and he really liked the movie too.  We´re planning on showing it again so that the members can bring all their friends to see it with them.

Meet the Mormons

This Sunday, we had 28 people at church.  Our goal for this transfer is to break 32 but it´s been harder than it seems.  A member gave a talk this week about faith.  It was her first time ever speaking in church.  She is a pretty recent convert from a about 2 years ago who got baptized and then had to move out to a pueblo for work and has just recently moved back to Cáceres.  She is so sweet and humble and she bore a very simple but powerful testimony of the Savior. We could tell she was a little nervous but when she testified I felt the Spirit very strongly.

The work is moving along here and I´m loving it.  I never thought that I´d love working in a small branch like this, but it´s awesome.  Elder González has been here for one transfer already and he goes home next transfer.

No, there aren´t any other missionaries here besides the Redds.

Things are going great and I hope things are going well back at home!  Love you and have a great week!

Love,

Elder Adamson

Elder Adamson's Letter 4/20/2015

Alright, so today has been a little bit crazy and I don´t have very much time to write you, but I want to let you know how I´m doing and what Cáceres is like.

On Wednesday, I arrived in Cáceres with Elder González after about 7 and a half hours on a bus.  It´s not a very big city and it´s pretty calm here, but I really like it.  I was kind of hoping to finish my mission in Andalucía but I´m perfectly happy ending here in Extremadura in Cáceres.  Here we have a branch and in church on Sunday we had 25 people at church.  The capilla is very very small and the chapel is probably about the size of our kitchen at home.  The branch has been here for about 15 years and it's growing slowly but surely.  The members of the branch are mostly Latin Americans.  There are a few Argentinean families, a few Colombians, a few hondureños (not sure how to say that in English) and from a few other Latin American countries.   In the ward we have a senior missionary couple.  They are the Redds and they are from Canada and they live in Florida.  Elder Redd is a counselor in the branch presidency and they´re doing a great job here.

This area is pretty different from what I´m used to working in, but I´m very excited to be working here.  All the other wards where I have served have had about 80 or 90 active members but here we are just about 25-30 at church every week including 4 missionaries.  One thing that I love though is that everyone here is really close and that they support each other a lot.  It´s weird to serve here though because we are so far away from the rest of the mission.

Elder González is great.  He goes home this transfer so I´m going to be his last companion.  He is from Corpus Cristi, Texas but his family is Mexican so he speaks fluent Spanish.  He´s a great missionary and we both served in the same parts of Murcia and Granada just at different times so it's fun to talk about our old areas together.

We have a few people here that we are hoping to baptize this transfer.    We don´t have any fechas with them yet but we´re going to be working on that with them this week.  I´ll give you more specifics on all the people and everything next week when I have more time.

I´m loving Cáceres and things are going great.  I´m pretty close to Madrid.  I think Cáceres used to belong to the Madrid mission a while ago.

Love you and have a great week!

Elder Adamson

Elder Gonzalez   Elder Redd   Elder Adamson

Elder Adamson's Letter 4/13/2015

  Hello everyone! This week has been what I like to call an opposition week...;)  Here's how it went.

So basically this week we've been trying to focus all of our efforts in the city of Granada instead of in the pueblos, because there is a chance that they'll take the car out of our area and move it somewhere else that needs it more than us.  It's been kind of a tough week.  We have been setting citas with lots of people and the great majority of them have fallen through on us, but we are keeping our heads up. 

We got to meet with one of our investigators this week named Osaze.  We taught him about the Restoration with Pedro and we had a really good lesson.  By the end he had it really clear that he needed to ask God if Joseph Smith really was a prophet.  That was one of the highlights of the week. 

This week is transfer week and I wasn't really sure what was going to happen with me so that's why I didn't say anything before. But, I'm getting transferred!  I'm going to CÁCERES and my companion will be Elder González. I don't really know much about the area or Elder González, but Cáceres is a branch of about 30 people from what I've heard.  It's also VEEEEEERY far away.  I'm pretty sure it's the farthest area away from the mission home.  Elder González goes home in 1 transfer and I'll go home the next transfer.  Sooooo weird to say that.  I'm excited to go there and I'm ready to give it my all in my next and last area. 

This week we went to visit Noemí and Victor who are members.  They invited us over for Victor's birthday so we went to visit them for a little while.  We had some cake and told jokes around the table for about 30 minutes.  We had a really good time with them. We're trying to help them now because they're having kind of a hard time.  Really great people. 

I've been saying goodbye to everyone in the past couple days and I have some pictures but I don't dare connect my camera to this computer because we're in a pretty sketchy Internet cafe right now.  I'll send you them when its more safe. :) I don't want to lose all my pictures. 

As I get closer to the end of my mission I really just want to become the best disciple of Christ that I can be.  I think about when President Monson said " I always want the Lord to know that if He needs an errand run, Tom Monson will run that errand for Him”.  That inspires me and that's exactly the kind of man I want to be.

Love you a ton and we'll talk soon! 

Elder Adamson 

Elder Adamson's Letter 4/6/2015

Hello everyone! 

Conference weekend has been great. President Deere´s prophecy was fulfilled and we all ate it up with forks and spoons. ;)

This week we had Concilio in Málaga.  President Deere announced that in May we will be receiving iPads.  I thought I had already missed my chance but it looks like I´ll be here for the whole process of working the iPads into the missionary work here in the Málaga mission.  Sometime in May we´ll be getting together as a mission in Sevilla to hear from Elders Allen and Dyches and to receive the iPads and the training on them.  Everyone in the mission is pretty excited about it. I like the idea that I´ll be an "iPad pioneer" in the Spain Málaga mission. The dates of everything aren't set yet, but we'll find out soon. We also finally got to see "Meet the Mormons" which was super cool.  We all loved it. 

This week was Semana Santa which means that all the processions were roaming around town during the week.  The work was a little slower than usually but it was nothing like Dos Hermanas last year.  Plus, here in Granada we don´t live in the center so we didn't really see any processions or anything.

We were able to find a new investigator named Juan Miguel this week .  He was a referral from Torremolinos.  We had a really good first lesson with him and we set a baptismal date for the 25th of April.  He came and watched conference with us at the church and I think he liked it.  He looks like he´s had a really hard life and he wants to turn things around.  

Conference was amazing.  I received a lot of answers to my questions.  Conference seems to always come around right when I need it.  I learned a lot of things that I wanted to know to help me finish my mission right.  I really loved President Eyring´s talk in Priesthood session.  I really want to be able to hear the words "Well done" when I finish my mission.  I've got lots to do still. 

Sorry this is kind of a short letter. 

Love you all and have a great week!

Love, 

Elder Adamson