Week 33: Love God ;)

Hello all :)

Welp, here I am again... and here you are again. Me typing, and you reading. Another week down in the mission here in Spain. We're running out of weeks 😁😜 What a week it was. Here's a little summary of what happened here in Almería.

Tuesday - We had the opportunity to watch the Sunday afternoon session of conference. Oh my heck. Holland. There wasn't a second during his talk when I didn't have the chills. THIS CHURCH IS SO FREAKING TRUE!!!! I loved how he said "Keep loving. Keep trying. Keep trusting. Keep believing. Keep growing. Heaven is cheering you on today, tomorrow, and forever." He also mentioned how the Lord blesses those who want to improve. If we are striving to be better every day, the Lord will see it and help us do it. :)

Wednesday - We had a lesson with Juan, and we taught him about the Priesthood. He's still a little confused about why his church doesn’t have this authority that we have so this was another helpful lesson. That night we had our weekly English class, but only to one guy. Everyone else called us before and said that they couldn't come, so it was just me, Berry and Francisco.

Thursday - We had a lesson with a less active member in our ward, Antonio. We taught him about service and how it's a lot easier to feel good about ourselves when we are helping others. He and his family are pretty lazy, so it was cool to see him get excited to help people and want to serve! That night we played basketball with Rafa and Enofre. We played full court with 4 people. What a great way to stay in shape. Wow! It was a freakin work out. Nothing but fast breaks. I was felt like Sammy Adams, goin "Coast to Coast”. 😏 (that's a song for those of you that don't know)

Friday - We went to Granada on Friday morning because we had zone conference! It was the first time our new zone had gotten together since transfer calls last March! Something kinda funny/sad. So at the beginning of 2016, every area that's in the mission set a goal for their area for how many baptisms they want to get in the year 2016. As a mission, we added up all the area numbers and set that as our goal for the entire mission for 2016. It ended up being 832, so far we have about 70. During 2015, there was like 350 ish. I’m hoping we can at least get to 400 this year. 😁 It was cool tho cuz after the conference, the zone leaders went to mercadona (a store) and bought a bunch of food and came back to the church and we ate as a zone! It was pretty good and I'm surprised at how successful it turned out due to how last minute it was. That night when we got home we had our weekly noche de hogar. Last week if you remember we had a total of 7 people come. This week we had another good turn out and there was 47 people there!!! There was so much food and all the members were so helpful. We watched Meet the Mormons, it was a really fun night. Almost 8 months into my mission and I still can't watch the part where the missionary leaves on his mission and says bye to his mom and family. I get so sad. 😫 So I left the room during that whole part lol.

Saturday - Played soccer during the morning, it was fun :) There is this dude who is from Scotland who was in Almería visiting a ward member. They met like last month at some singles conference thing, anyway his name is Jim! He's a 67 year old dude, (member) we met him at the noche de hogar. He doesn't speak very much Spanish but when he does, it's so funny. He played soccer with us! He's insane people. Like this guy has more energy than a freakin 5 year old kid. 😂 He's so hyper and giddy and jittery he’s always moving and talking and oh my gosh I just don't know how to describe him. His soccer skills are poor, but defensively he's a machine. The best is while he plays, he yells at all the Spaniards in English. I lost it when I heard him yelling "GO GET IT!!” and they literally just looked at him and laughed. He gave everyone a good laugh. :) We ate with Silvia during medio dia and then that night for dinner we ate with Angel and Myra again! Angel always compliments my watches whenever he sees me, so he asked if he could buy one so last night I showed him the Rockwell page and he's gonna buy one off of there next week when we go over to eat again! We had a really cool lesson with them and talked about serving others around us because they are so nice and are always so loving to me and Elder Berry. It's so hard to not be smiling and laughing whenever we are with them, I love them. :)

Sunday - Fast Sunday. I was so hungry during church holy shnikes. We had a new record for amount of people that were in church yesterday! At least, since I've been here. There was so many people (for Spain) 146!! It was awesome there was so many new people and visitors there. Even a family from Orem came! I think they have family or something here, but still it was good to talk to some neighbors. :) Last night, we tried to see if a lady who was contacted a couple years ago by other missionaries, her name is Maria. So, we knocked on her door, and this guy comes out and we say "hey is Maria here?" And he says... "No. Listen to me." Then he starts yelling… (In Spanish) "YOU'VE KNOCKED ON MY DOOR 50 TIMES ASKING FOR A MARIA AND 50 TIMES HAVE WE TOLD YOU SHE DOESN'T LIVE HERE!!!! NEXT TIME YOU COME HERE, IT WILL HE A LOT WORSE THAN ME JUST YELLING AT YOU EFFERS” It was funny cuz literally neither of us saw it coming. I told him thank you so much, and to have a great night. ❤️

And today, we finally had a fun PDay. We went to this place called Mini Hollywood and it was way cool! I will attach a bunch of pics. It's a western town and there was this way big zoo. It was fun to actually do something fun on a PDay finally.

There ya have it people. The week of THam in a not so short email, once again, sorry hahaha but I mean I gotta give the folks what the want. Like I told the guy who yelled at us to have a good night, I hope you all have a great week. ;)

I love you and thank you all for everything you do for me!!

Love,
Elder T Ham