Market Miracle

Thursday morning we had our district meeting, so we left home at 9:15am. There was almost no traffic this time, which is unusual. There are nine of us: four young Anziani, a Sorella threesome, and the two of us. Each week we do a "getting to know you" activity before settling down to business, and this week's was fun. Sorella James had us each answer three questions:

• which companionship in the group would you like to see in an updated version of  the MTC training video "The District", and why?
• who in the group could convert the Pope, and why?
• which missionary in the group do you admire most, and why?

Everyone wrote down their answers on little sheets of paper, and then Sorella James read them, more or less anonymously. With so many people, it took a lot of time, but we enjoyed it and learned a bunch about each other. My answer for the second question was Dee, because "she wouldn't let him say no!" One nice part is that we learned from their answers, which often named us, that they seem to really appreciate having us geezers in the group. Because the activity went so long, the meeting started to run over at the end, and we had to leave before it was over.

On the way from there into town, we stopped at the nearby Lidl for a big shopping trip, with some food for us but mostly for the Institute. While we were walking the aisles, a woman eyed my name tag and came up to ask who we were. I started to tell her that we were missionaries for our church, and she got real excited and started talking really fast in Spanish. Dee's Spanish is light years ahead of mine, though I was able to follow a little bit, The lady is a member of the church from Peru, and has been living here for a year to work. She left her husband and daughter at home to earn money, which is not uncommon; I guess that the economy here, with all of its problems, is still better than that of many South American countries. Anyway, she had not been able to find the church here (apparently she is not tech savvy enough to use the chapel locator on lds.org), and she was so excited that she started to cry. She told us about her family and showed us pictures, then promised to come to church on Sunday after we gave her our chapel address. She said that she never comes to that particular store, but that day she felt like she needed to. It's a good thing that we left on time from our district meeting, or we would have missed her. White shirt, tie, and name tag really stand out in a crowd!

From there we drove to the Institute, without using the GPS at all, which I think is a first for that route. Our normal routes are getting very familiar, which is nice for me. We had a ton of stuff to carry upstairs when we got there, and fortunately there were two young Anziani and their investigator waiting for us to arrive to start a lesson. They helped get it all upstairs in one trip, which we very appreciated.

I was pretty tired, not having slept well again -- not sure why, but it has been an issue recently. So once we got everything unpacked and ate some lunch, I took a nap in the classroom with a couch. It is nice to be able to cover the windows with the shutters, and I put in earplugs and used the blanket and pillow we keep on hand. After sleeping an hour or so, I felt much better, but my cold symptoms are still stubbornly refusing to go away entirely.

The afternoon and evening were pretty slow, as is common on Thursdays. It allowed for us to work on lessons, including Dee who is helping in Primary this coming weekend. Knowing her and seeing the visuals she was working on, she will knock the socks off everyone! I feel fairly prepared for Friday's lessons at this point, though a brief review will be in order beforehand. 

We got home just before 9:30pm, twelve hours after leaving home. Dee was exhausted and had an early morning dental appointment, so she zonked out fairly quickly. I did a bit of work on the stake choir music, preparing to post it on my web site for anyone to download, but I still need to get a few recordings of the parts. The weather has been gorgeous this week, warm but not too hot, and soon I will be switching from long-sleeve to short-sleeve shirts for the summer. Time is flying for us.