Life is Bueno!

The reunion sounds like it was a blast, I'm pretty jealous. Ive never played spike ball but I've seen it played before. I like the different ways the building scheduler was described, "she was a little confused" and "she hates us." Mom if you think that Spain is the greatest country in Europe I'm afraid your are quite mistaken. Germany can beat it any day.


So there's some good news and bad news from this week, I'll start with the bad news. We messed up pretty bad yesterday. A few weeks ago we got a referral from the US for a girl that spent about a year over there on an exchange program, part of which was with a host family who were members of the church. We had tried a few times to contact her to no avail, but yesterday we decided we'd try visiting her that evening. That morning at church a girl we didn't know walked in. The thought crossed my mind this could possibly be the girl we were wanting to contact, but then I heard a member say something to her husband about her and I assumed it was a relative or friend of those members. In the meantime we had already had a couple other investigators there who we wanted to talk to and the typical army of American tourists who come in and talk to us. So I forgot about the girl and didn't think about it again until that night when we visit the referral. A man let us in and said his daughter was home but busy talking to her host family from America. So we talked to the dad for a bit and after a while the daughter came in. And of course it was the girl who came to church. We could tell she wasn't happy about us being there and when she saw us she muttered something and went back to her room. The dad was really friendly and said we could come back, but that they're going on vacation for 3 weeks. At any rate because of me ignoring a spiritual prompting this girl who had the courage and initiative to go to the church on her own now has bitter feelings against the church in Germany and the missionaries...ouch.


On the bright side of things our 12 year old pal Marcos from Madrid has a baptismal date for the 2nd of September. He's an awesome kid and we're really excited for him. It's been quite the challenge teaching the lessons to a a 12 year old in a language that I don't speak terribly well, but I like a good challenge and Marcos is fun to teach.


Other interesting news is that we got a newspaper article written about us a couple weeks ago. It came about from a referral we got from Los Angeles. A German journalist came and visited the temple there and talked to the sisters and gave them his card, the information from which was then sent to us when he returned to Berlin. We visited the address, expecting to be led to an apartment and that we'd teach him about the restoration. Instead the address brought us to a massive office building where we had to make an appointment with our guy, Til Biermann. He told us he was interested in writing an article about the church and asked us some questions and later came to one of our street displays. Sadly there are things in the article that aren't totally correct and taken out of context, but I'd say overall it's positive.


I'd not think there's anything else too exciting from this week. Life is bueno!


Elder Larsen