The Biggoron´s Sword!

Well good ´ay ´ere mates.

Adel's Baptism

It has been a week.  It has been a really grand week.  Buenísimo.  The baptism of Adel went over smooth as ever.  He was super stoked.  He bore this grand testimony after about how he didn´t want to wait even minute longer and how he was afraid he was going to have to work during his baptism but in the end he didn´t have to and all this great stuff.  It was cool because Nani was there and it got her all stoked to have her baptism too.  She was like crying and all.  It was spiritual.  So that was a good Friday.  We also have been meeting with Sonia.  She is also from Paraguay.  I honestly don´t remember if I have said anything about her or not.  We just contacted her on the street during the fiestas of San Sebastián de los Reyes and now she has like a batrillion questions and said that she had only ever heard of tithing before but that she is really interested about learning more but wants to be sure of it before she makes a big change in her life and basically yeah.  And I made that a giant run on sentence so you could feel what it is like when she is asking question after question.   But something super cool with her is that after our first lesson she was like "well I have a sister that believes in the evangelio (gospel) but she is from a different church. I´ll talk to her about you guys".  We were just kinda like...ummmm....alright.....(oh crap).  And she did.  And her sister told her that she should never meet with us again and that if she did then there was a hell waiting for her instead of a heaven and that we didn´t even believe in the second coming and blah blah blah.  So for our second meeting with her she was like...."I have some doubts.  I talked to me sister and she told me [Insert all that stuff in here^^].  But I decided I needed to give you two fantastic boys another chance (she always calls us fantastic boys or her amazing children bahahaha).  We were like oh thank you so much! There´s tons of rumors about us and whatnot but we can tell you the truth about what we really believe.  And that´s when the million questions started haha.  But so that seems to us like there is quite a bit of potential.  Fingers crossed at least.  Sorry if that´s a lot of stuff.  She´s 40 years old and has 3 kids (of 21, 19, and 6 years). The 19 year old daughter went to church with her on Sunday but is really quite atheist/agnostic and doesn´t really care to learn more (like everybody in Spain that age).  So yeah. 

That brings me to my next thing.  Church on Sunday.  Elder Woodbury and I had talks.  I felt like my talk actually went really well.   This ward really kind of sucks at having like member involvement and leaders keeping everything in control and all that jazz so we really focused our talks on that.  Since it was the 10 year anniversary of 9/11 I talked about how there was a terrorist attack and how there were amazing firemen, police officers, soldiers, and all that helped save lots of lives but that really the mayhem was helped and overcome because of the willingness of all the ordinary people to get involved.  Likewise, there is still a spiritual terrorist that is constantly attacking us and his name is Satan.  Luckily, the Lord has blessed us with many "firemen, police officers, soldiers, etc."  These people are the Apostles, Bishops, Relief Society presidents, and other people with leadership in the church that help us, but that to really beat the spiritual terrorism that surrounds us we need the help of all the regular members.  Just like the importance that the regular citizens of the US helped us overcome that terrorist attack.  Then I talked to them about 3 principles that can help the regular members overcome Satan. 1-Invite everybody that is not a member or is less active to activities.  They might turn us down, but we need to be continuous in inviting people.  2-Magnify your calling.  Magnify your calling doesn´t mean you need to be some sobresaliente superstar at whatever you do, it just means you need to fulfill all your responsibilities and lift where you stand.  If everybody fulfills their responsibilities (like home and visiting teaching coughcough) then the Church will progress faster, and the 3rd principle was work with the missionaries instead of just giving the missionaries work.  If members and missionaries worked TOGETHER more then there would be sooo many more baptisms.  That was pretty much my talk in a nutshell, translated to English.  I hope you enjoyed it. 

Sonia was in church.  She liked it.  She told us that somebody had invited her to Zaragoza for the weekend, but that she turned them down cause had given us her word that she was going to church with us. I wish all investigators did that. Scoundrels.  Her daughter went with her (which I apparently already said).  They seemed to enjoy it.  The daughter was dead afraid of the Sacrament. ("What happens if I don´t partake of it? Do I have to? What is it?")  So I explained it to her and all. Then gospel principles went well except the teacher kept calling them investigators and they didn´t have any idea what that meant. "Are you an investigator?" "Ummmm. I dunno."  "Are you an investigator?"...hahahaha It was...interesting.  The sad part was Relief Society.  Ay ay ay....The Relief Society.  The Relief Society here is more like the Lion´s Den that Daniel was put into, except the investigators don´t know to pray for protection from the lionesses.  Luckily, Sonia is outgoing enough that she just had fun in the giant doctrinal argument that is our Relief Society.  You can imagine that the Spirit World after this life was pretty confusing to somebody we had only showed the Restoration DVD and explained a little bit about the Book of Mormon. 

Nani was also in church.  But she had to leave after the Sacrament meeting.  Her baptismal date is currently the 1st of October, but we talked about it in Ward Council last night and I guess that since it is Conference weekend that Saturday will be way too busy to be able to do it, so we´re gonna have to change the date.  Either to Friday the 30th, or to the week after (which is Stake Conference, so I dunno if that´ll work either).  We´re gonna talk with Nani about that soon.  She seems to be doing well though.  Elder Woodbury is worried about her if she really has a testimony of the church, but I think she is totally ready. 

Speaking of Elder Woodbury, all is well.  A lot of people have asked me if we get along hahaha.  Yeah.  We do. It´s really nice being with him again.  The work is picking up here in Alcobendas for the most part (considering we´re in the office for like 15-20 hours every week).  The office work is going well too.  This week is transfers (which we actually already found out).  This transfer ends on Sunday and next week is week one.  Crazily enough I am staying here in the Office with Elder Woodbury. It´s pretty normal to be here for 4 1/2 transfers, which equals out to about 6 months exactly.  1/4 of the mission.  Crazy.  This past month/transfer has been the fastest of my mission.  I mean, literally, it was probably pretty much the same as the others, but you know what I mean.  I´m lucky that Ben LeVere prepared me so much to be an office secretary.  Haha I learned all about the keeping computers organized and Word and Excel and all that blah before the mission, and I had not idea how much it was preparing me to this now.  Either preparing or condemning ;)  Así es la vida.

Pues, yo sé que esta iglesia es la iglesia verdadera.  I´m super grateful to be here riding the bull.  It´s rough and tough work, but it´s worth it.  It´s crazy because before the mission you just hear all the amazing miracle stories and how great the two years are.  It´s all true.  But there´s some other stuff in between the lines too jajaja.  I´m grateful to you all for being so dang good to me.  I love you all.  Keep on keepin´ on.  Let me know if there´s anything I can do for ya´lls. 

Love,

El Gran Elder Hijo de Jepp

P.S.  I guess I better explain the pictures.  P-day we went to the mission home to have a big "Everybody in Madrid together in the mission office" party.  Tell Ashley (Shane´s wife) to look at it and I´m pretty sure her sister or cousin or somebody related to her is Hermana Clark.  I could be wrong, but I think so. Also, um, that´s my district.  Which isn´t really changing.  And yeah.  Aquí es la vida del Elder Jeppson.