Monday, February 23, 2015

Week Five in La Línea

Hello!
Wow, this week has been crazy. The weather here in La Línea seems absolutely bipolar. It doesn´t want to decide on what it wants to be. Sometimes it´s very warm and sunny and the next day it´s stormy and rainy. Right now, we´ve got a relatively cool temperature outside. It´s been a nice day today. We just had a fantastic lunch with an older couple named the Guffeys who made us American style hamburgers and gave us brownies and ice cream. I don´t think I have ever missed American food so much. But it made it all the better to have it.

News from Alicante!!! So I have a friend named Denis in Alicante who is basically one of my heroes. He sent me over some pictures of the baptism of Luis! Luis is the boy from the Dominican Republic that we were teaching there in Alicante. I´m so, so happy for him. He´s great. I wish I could´ve been there for his baptism, but I´m super happy for him.

This last week has been as crazy as the weather. We had interviews with President Deere. Our bus left pretty soon after our interviews were over, and unfortunately, we left a little bit late and ended up missing our bus. Which would have been fine, except for the news that the next bus leaving for La Linea was coming in about 4 hours. We ended up having to stay in San Fernando and wait for the next bus. We got back pretty late. It was cool. There were some interesting buildings to see in San Fernando, but it got pretty cold.

A really cool miracle that happened this week. We contacted a guy named Pepe on the street the other day, and he told us to come by his house a little bit later. We passed by and invited him to church. We were not really sure if he was going to show, but when we walked into the bus station to go to church he was already there! He had brought his son who actually drove us to church, which cut our travel time down by a lot. It was amazing. What was even better was hearing him say how much he enjoyed church. Being here, so far away from the church. has really made me decide that I will never drive to church in Utah again. I don´t think I ever realized how blessed I was to have a church (well actually about 10 churches) really close to my house.

Gibraltar news. So, our goal in Gibraltar has been to locate all of the members. Having done that, we decided to move on to step two which was to have a family night. We have two really amazing members out there named Daniel and Estrellita. They provided the flat where we could have the meeting, and we brought the people. It turned out well, we had two inactive members and one investigator show up. We have been talking with the stake president, and he wants to come to one of the family nights to see if we can start a sacrament meeting out in Gibraltar which would be AMAZING.

Speaking of Gibraltar. I love Gibraltarians. They speak a mix of Spanish and English that I thought was only possible among missionaries. It´s fantastic. We have an investigator there named Denise. She knew the missionaries way back when missionaries were here about 10 to 15 years ago. She told us to meet her at Burger King last Friday. When we got there, she told us to go and order. I asked her if they took Euros, because we didn´t have any pounds, and she looked at me and said ¨You try and pay and I will leave and never come back!¨ I love Denise. she is fantastic. We are praying that we will somehow be able to get her to church so that she can progress to baptism.

We have had a really good week. One thing that I have learned this week is a lot about letting God take control of our lives. It´s something that I am learning on the mission. Before the mission, I felt like I had everything figured out. But the more time I spend on the mission, the more time that I recognize how little I actually know, and how much more I have to grow. The mission is great. It really, really shows the truthfulness of Ether 12 27, where it talks about weaknesses becoming strengths. I have a lot of weaknesses, more than most people that I know. What really comforts me is that God knows exactly where we need to be refined, and will give us trials specifically for that refinement. It will be a painful process, really, it won´t be fun. When we are passing through a difficult ´refiner´s fire´ we are never saying how enjoyably warm it is. We´re often just thinking of how quickly we want out. But one thing I know is that if we just keep pushing, that´s when we will see the blessing of the trial.

Anyway, thank you all so much for your love and support. you all are fantastic. I love you all so much..

It´s a great day to be a missionary!

Elder Weenig

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