Happy New Year!

It's crazy to think that I haven't written since last year!

*laugh track*

*freeze-frame*

*cut to closing credits*

So yeah! This was a good week. The majority of this email will be a partially recycled president letter, sooooo here ya go!

"Things are still pretty solid in Elda. We have made a lot of progress with organizing our Area Book app over the past week. There was a lot of info to add from points on our map app that was missing in the Area Book, updating the progress of people on record, and we did a lot of draining from the pool of names that we had to work with. A lot of them needed to be dropped for varying reasons. It was a little disheartening, but now it's nice to have things narrowed down to what is vital and current.

Speaking of disheartening, we had to drop Iván our investigator with a baptismal date. We haven't had contact with him in weeks and we are more than sure our number is blocked. We tried to stop by his workshop where we normally meet, but he doesn't answer the door. I have hope that the missionaries will be back in his life soon enough. This was a very unusual and sudden circumstance that happened without warning. In addition to that, Liliana, our other progressing investigator, has started working a job that gives us no time to meet with her, so we're trying to support her in the ways we can with quick stops on weekends and calling her during the week. We will see how that goes.

Fortunately, after the sea of dropped names and limited meeting times, we witnessed a little miracle rise from the depths. During our weekly planning, Elder Hansen was verifying the couple of people we recently dropped and one of them was his old #1 investigator. This man's name is Gabriel and he was progressing very well and accepting of everything, but something happened to his phone (assumed lost) and Elder Hansen and Elder Tabilo lost contact because that was their only form of contact with Gabriel. Back to weekly planning: Elder Hansen mentioned Gabriel and I suggested calling him again. Why not? He called and Gabriel actually answered! He had lost his phone and had just recently got his old number back with a new phone. He was happy to talk to Elder Hansen and we're in the process of meeting with him again.

Something Elder Hansen and I decided to do this week was try to get in contact with all of the less-active members and visit them if they were available. We've already met with a few and plan on visiting some more next week. We have been giving them a little holiday package and introducing ourselves. We hope to use this as a way to reestablish contact with quite a few people who have gone astray in this little town. I don't know how much of an impact it will have, but it's good to get to know more members here. Most of them are really friendly, just extremely busy.

Elder Hansen is doing well, I think. The mission will do him good. He could work a little harder on being more mature in circumstances such as driving and walking in the street, but that should come with time and experience. He is learning, making good improvements to his studies, and remaining diligent."

We had fun celebrating the new year yesterday! We had lunch at Inma's with Iván (recent convert who hit a year on th 31st) and Rosana. We also had dinner with Inma like we did for Christmas, but it was still really nice since we didn't have anyone to meet with otherwise. We man-handled some more shrimp. 

Iván (beard), Elloy (son of Inma), Inma, and Rosana

We were allowed to be out until 11 and stay up in-house until 12 to celebrate New Year's. The Spanish tradition is to rapidly eat 12 grapes during the last twelve seconds (or the first twelve seconds of the new year, or something like that) so being the non-grape-eater that I am, I coached Elder Hansen through it. 

Today we went on a little hike on the outskirts of Elx with all the Elx companionships (minus two who had eating citas). It was a nice little outing and a good opportunity to use my legs. I miss using my legs as much as I did in Badajoz.

Happy New Year! Make good goals! Keep them! Hopefully at least one of them are spiritually based!

Elder Jensen :)

P.S. Mom, the first thing people say over here when they see pictures of you is that you are gorgeous and very young-looking. In a purely complimentary way--nothing creepy.

Just thought I'd let you know! (This cracked us up)

Love ya,

Elder Jensen :)

Oh! Elder Nye is engaged! Whoo! I said he would be engaged in under 6 months and he was all like "no way" but I flippin' knew it!