Week 69: Snails and sunshine

Well friends and family, I've officially been inaugurated as an
official spaniard. One of the most popular things you will see walking
around in the summer are giant buckets of snails, just crawling over
and under one another, of all different sizes. It makes you wonder,
hmmm what are these for? Until you walk by a bar and here the sweet
slurping sound of a spaniard sucking a sauce-covered snail out of its
shell. Well, this last week I was the snail-sucking spaniard! My
companion and I asked just for small plate "to try" a couple of the
cabrillas (big snails) and got an entire bowl of them, and then made
the mistake of asking to try some of the caracoles (small snails) and
got the same size bowl. But we ate them all! Videos and pictures to
come.

It was a great week. We found out that unfortunately my time of making
mr.bean jokes to the people on the street have come to a close, as my
good friend and companion will be heading out to finish his mission in
a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. My new companion is one
of the elders who has been working in the office for the last couple
months, so hopefully he will have a lot of energy to work! I'll be
staying in Sevilla, and praying to get out before the real heat hits
in August...we shall see.

One cool miracle we had this past week. We were walking down the
street and I quickly glanced over at a side street and saw a girl on
her phone. As we walked past I jokingly said to my companion, "I think
she wants to accept the restored gospel of Jesus Christ" and then the
thought occurred to me...well what if she does? So we turned around
and began to talk with her and after a couple of minutes we found out
that her entire family are members of the church and active back in
her country and she has been inactive since she got here to Spain 12
years ago. Funny enough, her son who is living with his grandma had
just called her a couple of days before to tell her that he wanted to
get baptized and ask permission. We were able to talk about the
decision that she had made and what her son was deciding to do. We
gave her a Book of Mormon and she agreed to meet with the missionaries
to be able to learn more, which is where found out that she was only
visiting that day from northern Spain and happened to be waiting for a
store to open when we found her. I thought of all of the prayers of
her family members who had surely asked that we be guided to be able
to find her daughter, who hadn't seen missionaries in the entire time
she has been here in Spain, and just because of a little joke we had
made, we were driven to talk to her. I guess the question to ask
ourselves instead of why, should be why not? Why talk to her? Better
yet, why NOT talk to her? I think that is the question that will open
our lives to more of the miracles God has in store for us.

I hope that you all have a great week !

Love,

Elder Jenkins