we can't change the wind against us, but we can adjust our sails

Greetings from here in Spain,

Well that week just flew by, holy moly. Time always goes a little slower when you get to a new area or get a new companion, but lately, since we´ve been together for a bit now, it's been going by pretty fast.

So some news for this  last week--my left eye hasn´t stopped twitching since Tuesday, getting kind of annoying now. I´ve got a permanent goose egg on the top of my head from hitting it on the door frame while walking in and out of houses or rooms. You´d think I would have learned by now but nope, they still get me, And it still hurts. Kayla remember when we went to LA together and I jumped on a mattress in Justin and Julie´s garage and I unfortunately didn´t see the screw hanging down from the shelf? Gosh, I smacked that thing hard! Haha took everything not to cry in front of everyone, had to choke down my tears and ask you in secret if my head was bleeding. Haha poor kid.

Well the missionary work is moving forward, we continually witness blessings every day. We found a woman from Haiti the other day (didn´t Uncle Sam serve in Haiti??) and she is super awesome. Doesn´t have much except her 2 little kids, no job. But she is so humble and sweet, makes me feel horrible for everytime I was selfish and whined about not having a cool phone or being able to by nice and expensive clothes all the time. The mission has opened my eyes, There are some many people here who just have the bare minimum and go day to day to live, and I think it should be a life lesson learned for each one of us. Many of us haven´t had to worry each day if there will be food on the table, but I don´t think it would be a bad thing to experience either. We could all learn something from them and quit worrying about that and focus on the more important things. They are able to recognize the littlest of blessings, which is important. We had zone conference on Thursday and they talked a lot about having a good attitude and how that can change the outlook of your mission in whole. So I´ve been a personal goal, and I hope you all will as well, to always strive to have a good attitude amidst the trials and hardships. We can´t change the wind against us, but we can adjust our sails.

The family from Bolivia is doing great, Carmen, the mom, is so golden. It amazes me everytime we leave the house. She has true desires and the Lord is blessing her and us as well.

I´m doing great, happy and healthy :) I made those cookies on Wednesday and they are sooooooo good. I had forgotten how good they were!! Wow, thank you so much for sending those ingredients. Thanks for all of the gifts as well, I love the flip flops and shirt! I had a great birthday, not that it was much different than any other day haha, but it was really good. 

I hope you all have a great week!

Love Elder Franson

teaching mostly south americans

Hello to all,

This week was a pretty good one, had some great experiences and miracles. First I wanted to tell you about this new family that we are teaching. The Lord blessed us big time with giving us this opportunity to teach them. The mom´s name is Carmen and she has 2 kids, a girl who is 14 and a boy who is 8, kind of like Cady and Porter :) This family is super golden, honestly they just accept everything and also they have some really good questions. The 14 year old girl asked, sincerely, "Just, why aren´t there prophets now? Can´t we have a prophet just like they did back then?" I don´t think I would have ever of thought of things like that when I was 14 haha. The thing I'm worried about is just the dad. We´ve never met him and I don´t want him to think we are going behind his back and teaching her crazy things. Pray for them, please. 

 

Interesting story, so we´re serving in Spain, right? Spain, should be a lot of Spaniards here is what I thought. Well there are a lot of Spaniards but typically they are a lot more hard-hearted, they just have a harder shell that needs to be cracked. The South Americans are a lot more accepting and open. The Spanish people have a long history of Catholicism and don´t like to change from their ways very often. But we do have one investigator who is from here in Spain. He is pretty good but his life is really tough right now, just barely lost his job and around the same time, his wife left one day with his 2 kids. We can tell he is depressed and is struggling a lot, but I hope that as we continue teaching him and helping him get closer to his Heavenly Father it will help him have more strength and confidence. He has already come to church twice!

Ok, love you all so so so so much! Have a fantastic week.

Elder Franson

american breakfast, minus the syrup

Hey all,

Okay. This week was amazing and frustrating...but more than anything amazing.

So, the frustrating moment was when we were at English class on saturday (and that Ecuadorian family always comes), and when we invited her to church again (she came once) she said "Oh well actually we just want to go poco a poco (little by little), and we already attend an Evangelist church. So for now we´re fine. I mean its all the same God, right?" Ugh, made me so sad. She obviously didn´t understand us when we taught the authority part. But who knows, maybe their time isn´t quite yet.

But the miracles were flowing this week, we have a total of 5 new investigators--found them all in the streets--who are just AWESOME. Two of them are a couple, in their mid 20s, the guy is super buff and my companion has dubbed him as "the Abocrombie model" haha. he wouldn´t seem like the type to accept the Gospel, but he did! The other one is a guy from Peru who just accepted everything super easily and gladly. I was super surprised and happy. The other ones are a family from Ecuador (ok I swear everyone we talk to here is from South America, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Columbia. The Spaniards typically have a lot harder of a shell than Latinos. So basically I have all of the South American missions in my mission haha). They are all really really good and I´m so happy! Pray for them please, Satan is very motivated to make everyone fall.

Also, on Thursday, we cooked an American breakfast for the recent converts Beatriz and Edison. We did pancakes, french toast, scrambled eggs, and bacon. Mmm so good. Other than the fact that syrup is no where to be found here in Spain which is annoying, but we made do. They really liked it, or maybe they were just saying that to make us happy, never know. I always tell the members when they feed us that their food was super good even when I was about to gag, so maybe they are giving me a taste of my own medicine.

Thanks for all your love and prayers, sure do appreciate it. Oh, tell the Blums thanks for that card for me.

Can´t wait to Skype you this Sunday!!!!

Love, Elder Franson

april miracle

Family and Friends,

Ok we witnessed the coolest miracle this week. I don´t think I wrote about them last week, but we found a family in the street that is amazing. It is a mom and her 5 daughters who are all from Ecuador. It freaks me out sometimes because some of the little girls remind me of our little cousins like Kate and Camille. Their ages range from 3 to 15 which sounds to me like quite a big load for the mom (the dad is working down in the south and can´t live up with them) but they are just the cutest little girls ever. We have taught them once so far and they all seemed to accept it pretty well. The mom is an Evangelist but I think she´ll come around. We gave them 2 copies of the Book of Mormon and when we handed a copy to the 13 year old girl, named Andrea, she immediately started reading the introduction. We found out later that that night she had read all of that and the all of the testimonies in the beginning of the book as well! We at the chapel on Sunday waiting for our investigators but none of them had shown up--punks--but after the meeting had started the door opened and in walked that family! It made me so so happy. I´m pretty sure they had a good time, I´m not exactly sure what the mom thought of it but I know the 3 youngest girls just loved primary haha. We looked in the door and they had the biggest grins on their faces and started waving to us, just makes me so happy to see their joy and the happiness people find here. We are going to make them all their own little bookmark with a scripture or something on it so they all can keep their own place in the Book of Mormon, try to make it fun and cute for them haha.

Elder Galeano and I are doing great, haha we have some really fun times. He loves talking about girls, and without fail he always points out the prettiest ones in the street. Sometimes he gets a little unfocused while we´re in the street...haha but it's alright. He is a great companion, and his helping me with my Spanish a ton.

Oh hey Dad, you´re gonna be super proud of me. A member gave us some lentils to bring home and eat, so I cooked some rice (my first time actually cooking rice by myself) and ate it with the lentils. To be honest, I really like them now, but I remember in the past when I just hated them hahaha, sorry for that haha, they really are good.

Oh tell Stephanie congrats! I´m so so happy for her. I want to see a picture! 

Well, Have a great week! I love you all.

Elder Franson

easter thoughts

Hello Family!

I hope you all had a great week, a great Easter. It was really weird, becuase the branch here in Alcorcon didn´t mention anything about Easter in any of the talks of classes. Weird, right? I´m not sure what happened, But i had some time to think about Christ and his resurrection. It is amazing to think of all of the things he did just for us. So that we can live again, so that we can have another chance. I just watched the video on lds.org that is called becuase of Him. So good. Please go watch it. My appreciation for my Savior has definitely grown a bunch in just these few months I´ve been out here. My eyes have been opened to see all of the things that have come from Him, from His sacrificies. Many things that I hadn´t realized before.

So we went to the temple again this past Wednesday, and it was another great spiritual experience for me. We spent as much time as we could in the Celestial room haha. I think Satan really didn´t want me to stay on that spiritual high, becuase on the metro ride home I lost my wallet. Yep. Residency card, driver's license, debit card, temple recommend. Gone. That was a very stressful afternoon for me. I´m really really sorry, Mom!

Another tough thing this week was that my companion has gotten pretty sick, I don´t know what it is maybe the flu or something. But he is super exhausted and his throat really hurts so he can´t talk haha. We had to got to the apartment a couple hours early last night which was super weird for me haha. Now I know what Jess is talking about when he said it took him a couple tries after his misssion to watch Harry Potter becuase he was still in that mission mode, of always working, always doing something.

Lately, some of our good investigators, like Lucho, and others haven´t been answering their phones! Which is kind of annoying. But we had a cool miracle the other day. This family from Ecuador, that we had stopped and talked to in the street about a week ago, just randomly showed up to English class and we were able to talk to them a bit before English class and they are really cool. Hopefully we´ll be able to meet with thim this week and share a message with them.

Oh I just wanted to say one more thing. So with packages, before you send them ask me about it first. Because I don´t want you to send a package to my piso and then I get transferred right before it comes and then I´ll never be able to get it. Right now we have 3 more weeks left in the transfer so you should be good. I got the slip thing that says my package is waiting but I haven´t been able to pick it up yet becuase this whole week it was been closed for Easter, the ´semana santa´. But thanks so much for sending it! I can´t wait to see what´s inside :)

Have a great week, don´t be afraid to share a little thing or thought about the Gospel with your friend. The Lord will bless you and your friend

Love Elder Franson

lucho, the investigator

Hey everyone,

Well, we had another week of some ups and downs. Like I´m sure every other missionary in the world.

 I want to tell you all a little about one of our investigators named Lucho, I think I might have written a little about him before, but we´ve been meeting with him and he is just the coolest. He is 21, from Ecuador, and me and him will probably be friends for a long time. He is really mature for his age, lots of the 18-25 year olds here are just too busy smoking, drinking, and showing too much PDA in the street that is not appropiate from us missionaries to see. But Lucho is still that really cool guy, but doesn´t do that bad stuff. He really wants to be baptized, we´re just working at meeting with him regularly and setting a date.

During our weekly planning session that we have every Thursday, we have the chance to set personal and companionship goals. My companion and I were talking and decided to set a goal of finding a family, a good family. Well the other day while we were walking in the street, we stopped to talk to a husband and wife as they were packing up their car to leave, and they are super interested! Gave us their number, and said they´d love to hear more another day. What an answer and blessing to our prayers. We are hoping to get something set up soon with them so we can share the Gospel with them.

Ok, well thats about it, the pictures I have atttached are of me and my new comp, Elder Galeano, eating some Ecuadorian popsicle and then in our piso.

I love you all, thanks for everything. I am so grateful for your support and encouragement. Have a good week!

Love Elder Franson

post-conference glow

Hey everyone!

Great start to the transfer. Elder Galeano and I are doing really well. He is from the states, but his dad is from Ecuador and mom his from Puerto Rico. He grew up in a home where they only spoke Spanish, and he learned English from school and friends. Since I really want to work on and better my Spanish, we´ve decided that while we´re out side in the streets we will only speak Spanish to eachother. Its going great; our personalities are a lot more similar than they were with elder mower. We get along really well and he is an awesome missionary.

We got to watch conference (thank goodness!). We traveled to the temple where the stake center is and watched it there. They had a room for the missionaries so we could watch it in english haha. We were able to watch all of them (at weird times though because the afternoon sessons were too late to broadcast here) except for the Sunday afternoon, but we are planning on watching that on Wednesday for district meeting. What were your guys´s favorite talks? I liked a lot of them, but I really liked Holland's as he talked about standing firm and defending your faith. I could relate to it pretty well. We get a lot of stupid comments thrown at us, rude looks, laughs, but when I heard that talk it reinforced my urge to stand strong, to not give in. Satan is doing all he can to get us to back down, but we´re not going to let him. I also liked something what Bednar said about how the Lord makes our burdens light. He doesn´t take the trial away from us, but instead he strengthens us. After all, that's why we are here. To learn and grow and to get stronger. That is why we have these trials. We need to trust in the Lord to make us stronger. We cant turn away from him.

Also, I found out like I´m sure many of you did, that Henry B. Eyring likes the Yankees. Noooooooot okay. Haha. I saw Melissa and Lorenzo in the choir! Had to point it out to my comp that I have an aunt AND and uncle in the choir :) Also, is Brother Hart's wife in the choir?? I thought I saw a lady who looked like her.

We´ve been doing a lot of contacting and finding in the street, don´t have many investigators. The one really good one we had, Libe, who we had a baptismal date with as well for next Saturday, called us and told us not to come by again. Her husband came back (didn´t even know she was married) and is super mad she was meeting with us. It made me so sad, she was so close, so close to something that would change her life forever. I guess it isn´t her time yet. I know God has a plan for everything, we just need to get out of the way and do his will. Even if it is hard or tough of frustrating. It won´t always be the easiest way.

We met a girl in the street the other day, named Fiorela, from Peru, who we came to find out was taught by the missionaries over 3 years ago and was amazing! But I guess something happened right before her baptismal interview and she didn´t pass. So after that it was tough, she didn´t feel as comfortable there and then little by little she lost contact with the missionaries. But we found her again and she seems so ready! Pray for her that she´ll feel comfortable to come back to church and pick back up where she left off, she needs your help.

Thanks for the emails, you are the best! I hope you have a great week!

Love Elder Franson