Thanksgiving in Spain

Hello everyone! 

I hope you all had a cool Thanksgiving. We were lucky enough to be able to celebrate an American Thanksgiving here in Spain last Thursday. That day we had a zone training in the morning, then afterwards we had a big feast. A senior missionary couple had gone to Costco to buy a turkey and they also made some other food like stuffing and cranberry sauce and the rest of us all brought smaller side dishes. It was a pretty good day. We had 3 hours for Thanksgiving before we had to go back to our own areas. It was cool to have a break for an afternoon to celebrate that. The only bad part was that the Diez family had invited us over to eat that night, so by the time we got back to Guadalajara we went straight over there and we were super full. We could barely eat the food they made for us, but they were nice and they gave us tupperwares to take the rest of the food home. 

This week it's been raining pretty much every day. It doesn't rain all the time, but it's pretty much always cloudy now. I think now, it's rained more here than it usually does in a whole winter back in California. Even so, we still went to play soccer on Saturday afternoon. Luckily it wasn't raining during that time. 

In other news, our bishop was in the hospital last weekend because of a work accident. He was working on the TV antenna of an old house in Molina de Aragon, a town almost 2 hours northeast of Guadalajara, and he slipped off the roof because the roof tiles were older and weren't secure, and there was a bunch of snow. He broke two vertebrae in his back (shout out to my buddy Jacob) and has been able to walk hardly at all in the last week. On Monday we visited him, after he had gone home, and he's doing better but he needs time to recover. 

So in the zone training last week, one thing they talked about was baptism. The zone leaders said that it's something that we can't just save until we think people are ready; we need to talk about it before then, to make sure that they understand our purpose and so that they can have it in mind, and so we can help with any doubts concerning it. So after that, we decided to apply it to our own area, Guadalajara. On Friday we met with Carlos, one of the Colombian guys who plays soccer with us and comes to church most of the time, and we invited him to be baptized once he knows that the Book of Mormon is true, and he said yes! He still needs to read more to understand because he hasn't read too much and it's still all new to him, but he's trying to learn. Then on Sunday, we had a lesson with Rosa Maria. With her, we had already invited her and she wasn't sure and she wanted to be more certain in her decision, so we had prepared some scriptures to share with her to try and explain that she wouldn't start off with a strong testimony of the church. Her concern was that she wanted to have a sure answer from God when she prayed about it. We had some scriptures ready to try and help her, but right at the beginning when we met with her on Sunday afternoon she told us she had something to tell us, then she said "Yo he decidido bautizarme" (I've decided to get baptized) and it took a second for it to register in our English-speaking minds, but we were super happy. For me, I thought back to the first lesson we taught her and how much she had progressed and it was such a cool experience to see it all. She asked us when it would happen, and we planned it for December 17th. She told us that that day, during sacrament meeting, she had felt like the things that the speakers had said had been directed at her and her personal needs. It was also something that strengthened my own testimony of the church. Seeing someone else finding the answer that this church is the true church is something that has been amazing for me. I'm so grateful that I could be here to see that and to help Rosa Maria find that out for herself. 

I hope you all have a wonderful week and I love you all!

-Elder Dobbs