May 26, 2014 - - Jaén, Espana

Hello all!

Well, the weeks just keep going by and I don´t know where the heck they go. This one was great. Hermana Volpe and I are doing great here. We love the time we spend together. Sometimes I think we have a little too much fun, haha. It´s great. Well, Manolo has come back to church and they gave him the Melchizedek Priesthood. It was so awesome to see him in church again. He was so happy. I love going to his house with his sister Mercedez. It´s interesting because it is him and his sister that live in the house alone and they literally NEVER leave the house. Always always there. Since they don´t get out too much, not too much is going on in their lives. When we go over, sometimes it takes a bit to get a conversation going, but I´ll tell you, haha, I think that I feel more successful when I make them laugh, than I have in my whole mission. It sounds weird, but really, I stinking love making them laugh. They don´t get to all that often, so when they really are laughing, it makes me the happiest person in the world.

Anyway, also this week we found two new investigators that seem really great. One is the wife of a less active member. She is interested and wants to know more. The other is from a text message that we got saying that she ordered a Book of Mormon online. We went over and gave it to her and she said she wanted to read it. She found out about the church through a woman in the ward, Juanita. Juanita is the greatest person I´ve ever met. She is like 85 and no joke talks to every living thing on the planet about the gospel. Bus drivers, doctors, EVERYONE. Well, most of the time to be honest it doesn´t work, but sometimes you get people like MariJose who is prepared. To me it just shows the importance of talking to everyone about the gospel because you never know when someone is ready for it.  

Also, we have this guy Dani. He is the grandson of this same Juanita in the ward. He is 23 and we just started teaching him. Well, he had an accident a while ago and had to get surgery on his leg. He had to go through a lot to get it. The last time we met with him he expressed his feelings on it all. It was super cool. He told us that he truly believes that God made him go through that so that he could shape up his life and get it into order. Now he is having tons of great experiences with prayer. It´s like the Spirit is teaching him before the missionaries. We´re really excited.

Well, that´s about it for now. The work is going well. Actually we just changed areas a bit in the city so we are dealing with a whole new area. I feel like I am opening again a little, but it´s fun. New territory, new people. Thanks everyone for everything and love you all!

Hermana Kunz

Beautiful plaza here! Love Spain!

May 19, 2014 - Jaén, Espana

Hola todos!!!

Well, guess what....I officially get to speak Italian again! Wow, is it amazing. I did get the Italian to train and her name is Hermana Volpe. My word has the Lord blessed me. She is incredible. We are having such a good time together. We speak Spanish in the streets and for missionary things, but other than that, we go back and forth between Italian and English because she really wants to learn English. It´s super cool though because any time she has a question or doesn´t know a word, she speaks to me in Italian and we go from there. I´m so blessed to have her. She is incredible. And the cool thing is that she lives about 20 or 30 minutes from where I lived in Italy. I have been to her city and we even know one person in common. It is just so stinking cool to have her.

So this week with her has been great. We started off going to the Cruz family´s house and it was a great lesson. They are inactive and don´t want to come back, but they usually let us stop by once in a while to talk. Well, most of the time while sharing a spiritual message, they are looking around not paying too much attention, especially the dad. Well this time, we shared a message on the Restoration and when we said the First Vision, their eyes became completely locked on us. It was so cool! The Spirit just filled the room. We then asked them if they had testimonies of Joseph Smith and they all said that they knew he was a prophet. It was definitely the best lesson we have had with them and we saw some real progress. I keep on saying it, but there is just so much power in the First Vision. I love giving it because it is guaranteed that the Spirit will enter the room.

Hermana Volpe can cook like a champ so we made this homemade bread for Manolo´s birthday and surprised him with it. We are still working with him on coming back to church and trusting in the Lord and His plan for him. We have a lesson with him tonight and have a good one planned so we are hoping for the best.

Let´s see other than that, everything is going great. We are loving it here and loving the crazy Ward that we are in. They are all awesome. Thank you all for everything and hope you have a great week. Love you!

Hermana Kunz

 

My new companion from Italy and I!

We made this delicious bread!

Picture of where we work everyday. It´s beautiful!

Classic Hermana Kunz, haha

 

May 12, 2014 - Jaén, Espana

Hey there everyone!

Well, another week has gone by and it was a good one. I got to talk to the family yesterday, and of course that was awesome. Love Mother´s Day! This week was pretty relaxing. Nothing too extreme. I had to go to Málaga for trainers training with President and tomorrow I will go to pick up the new sister. We are all very excited to meet her. Jaén is sad to see Hermana Demayola leave. We have had a lot of fun together and she will go on to do great things. I was happy to have been with her. I learned a lot with her. But now she is heading out to Murcia.

Since she is leaving members have been feeding us like crazy. Sooooo full all the time. For 5 de Mayo we spent it with a family and ate Mexican food. First time in a year! It was incredible.

We had a good Relief Society activity this week. In Spain it is a little hard for them to dress modestly, so they put on an activity that explains the worth of a woman. It was a really good way of going about modesty with the women. I think it made a difference.

Haha, we went to a member´s house on Monday and he had a ton of bunnies everywhere. We were excited about it until he told us that he would be happy to make a bag out of their fur after they are done eating them. Whew! No thank you.

Well, like I said there wasn´t too much that happened this week. We were out for two days in Málaga so that´s about it. I´m really excited to meet the new missionary and to learn from her. I´m loving everything out here and hope time doesn´t go too fast. There is too much to do out here. Thanks everyone for everything and love you all! Hope Mother´s Day was great for all.

Hermana Kunz

Fun times in the park for p'day

May 5, 2014 - Jaén, Espana

Hello todos!

Well to start things off, I got a call from President on Saturday telling me that I am training again! I was pretty excited. I was hoping I would be able to train one more time before finishing. And here is the best part. There are three natives and one Italian. Gaaaahhhh, I am trying not to get my hopes up too high on the Italian, but it would be super cool. No matter what though, I´m sure she will be great. I´m very excited. I will go to pick her up in Málaga next Tuesday.

This week has been really good. Let´s see, we had a ¨Consecration Week.¨ It was being 100% obedient in everything. Just kicking it up a notch. It was a great week for us. One cool thing that happened was that we went to a member´s house named Juanita, and we invited our investigator Magdalena over. Well, Juanita got really sick really quickly and she couldn´t get out of bed. She asked for a blessing so we called two men from the Ward and they came over and gave her a blessing. Well, Magdalena got pretty emotional and asked if she could have a blessing of comfort, and it went great! She told them that she really wants to get baptized soon, it´s just that her husband won´t let her. So we are just praying that her husband´s heart will soften. It was a really cool experience though.

Yesterday was Mother´s Day here in Spain so we went and visited a couple of the sisters who are alone. It was fun for us because we didn´t want to bother people on a special day and they were looking for people to be with. It was definitely a win-win situation.

We had a cool lesson with our investigator Antonia as well. We have been teaching her a lot, but she has a past of kicking the missionaries out when they bring up baptism so we have been hesitant. Well, we got the guts up and asked her what was keeping her from it and she explained that even though she reads all about why, she just doesn´t see the necessity of being baptized. Then we asked why she thinks people get baptized other than for the reason of being able to live with God again and have the Holy Ghost. She said that she thinks it is so that they can become closer to Jesus Christ. We asked her if that is something she wants and she said of course it was. BAM! She still didn´t agree to it, but she definitely thought more about it. She wants to be closer to Christ and the next step to do that is baptism. It was a good lesson with her. 

Alright, well, that´s it for today. Happy Mother´s Day to all of you awesome moms! Have a wonderful week and thanks for everything!

Hermana Kunz

April 28, 2014 - Jaén, Espana

Hello there everyone!

Wow, what a week. Well first off, I got to go to Dos Hermanas on splits this week!!!! My word, it was so awesome. Being able to go back to my area and see and talk to some people.  It was like going home after a vacation. I sure do miss that place. So many awesome memories. Plus, I got to be with Hermana Folsom, so it was just like old times! We went over to this family Gloria and Angel´s house. They were a family I got close with so they picked me up from the train station and we ate with them. We showed this video on Easter called ¨Because of Him.¨ If you haven´t seen it, look it up right now. It is so good. It talks about what the Savior did for us and how we can always start again. It was a great lesson and Gloria felt the Spirit really strongly. She has been less active for over 20 years and her son isn´t a member. When she saw the video she bore a strong testimony that we hadn´t ever heard explaining to her son that that was why she got baptized in the church. It was so cool to hear her testimony to her son. A really cool moment. Going back to Dos Hermanas was such a big blessing and a miracle. I sure do miss that place.

Hermana Demayola has gotten a rash and has caused us to slow down a little. We have gone to the doctor, but unfortunately they don´t really know quite what it is. We are trying to figure it out. But we are still trying our best.

Thursday was a funny experience. We had to get to a lesson in 20 minutes and were far away. So we tried a short cut that we had never taken before and it ended up being a dead end. We surely didn´t have time to go all the way back and then up again so we found a wall and decided to climb up and jump over it. So there goes Hermana Demayola and she is over. Then it´s my turn. Here we go, climb up, get ready to jump off, and SMACK! Right back into the wall. My skirt got stuck on the back and I was just hanging there, stuck. I couldn´t move at all. Haha, poor Hermana Demayola had to climb up and try to get me off, but it took a while because we were both laughing so hard. So there we go...another good Laura story. Got plenty of those.

My lesson in Sunday School yesterday was about how to recognize good from evil. It was a really good lesson, especially because we could all relate with one another going through the same trials and such with our age. We had a great discussion about the many times the adversary tricks us by making something look like it is good, but in reality it leads us down a slow path of misery. We talked about ways we can avoid it, and actually the example of Joseph Smith came up. When he wanted to know if something was good or bad, he looked, studied the scriptures, meditated about what he read, acted, prayed, listened, and acted again. I´m really enjoying being the teacher in their class. It´s cool to learn together with them.

Well, that´s all for this week folks. Thanks for everything and hope you have a fantastic week. Love you all!

Hermana Kunz

Fun to be with these people again

Love my companion  :)

Maria Isabel and I reunited once again!