El Albedrio De Los Demás

Or, the agency of others. We'll get to that in a sec.


The Gijon ward (and by extension, my area, Áviles) is supposedly the promised land. I've heard this from most of the missionaries who served here before, including one of my trainers, my first district leader, and another cool guy I had some great exchanges with. One might say it was my destiny to arrive here. And as good as this area is, sometimes there's gonna be that one week.


This week we set a ton of appointments and did our best, but had lots of lessons fall through or cancel. I guess that's just missionary work, but it's never fun in the moment. According to Elder Tapia it was an unusually slow week for such a great place. But people have their agency, we're not here to force anything on anyone. All we can do is set the appointments, share what we can, testify when we've got a chance, and invite people to come unto Christ. 


Big moments? 


We tried like four days in a row to meet with this guy named Manuel. When he finally had time, it took up like 20 minutes to find his house. He was super friendly, loved the idea of us being missionaries, and, when we tried to set expectations about what we'd be taking about and teaching him, he practically set his own expectations of multiple visits, commitments, and personal study. It was fire. We're teaching him again in a few hours, wish us luck. He's also Dominican like Elder Tapia and they want to show me food from their country. Heck yeah.


Met with a Brazilian guy named Valdemir (not a typo) and his wife Luisa, who had a lot of questions about the Plan of Salvation. Jorge, the member who came with us, had a ton of insights and ways to explain it that went really well. Having members in lessons is irreplaceable.


Slice of Life:


We arrived in the area las week on Saturday night, I met people in the ward on Sunday like I talked about last week, and by Monday afternoon we were on another four-hour train to Madrid. MLC was awesome though, and we brought back a ton of stuff to apply in our zones. And we brought Appletizer with us.


Been cooking up a storm and getting creative since we still haven't done a full shopping trip yet. We did, however, buy ingredients to make quiche on a mission wide Zoom call with President and Hermana Eastland. Trouble is, we arrived late and missed the whole cook-along. Then Elder Tapia had the brilliant idea to make like a fried calzone thing with the pie crust we bought (no one tell him I called it a calzone, apparently it's not. He used to work as a chef so we'll go with that). We were in kind of a hurry, so it didn't go perfectly. After the smoke alarm turned off, it was ugly but actually pretty good! See photos.


The Gijon hermanas made me brownies! Shoutout to Sisters Gowers and Fitisemanu


Y'all take it easy
Elder Curtis 


Pics
Elevator selfie
Fine Spanish literature
1 Year Brownies
Asturian greenery. I have so many pics like these.
Edible (?) not-calzone (Italian empanada?)





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