White Days in Bilbao

Many times in the mission field when you talk about having a white day, people are talking about a baptism. Surely we baptize here in the Spain Bilbao Mission. Matter of fact, the mission for 2009 was up 81% over 2008. That is a significant increase and we attribute that to the hard work and dedication of our missionaries and the Spirit of the Lord resting on people and preparing them to hear the words of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ. Here we have our ayudantes Elders Ashby and Dredge with their last baptism, a wonderful man by the name of Aingeru. He is very close friends with the Martin family of Las Arenas. This was a wonderful baptism and the spirit of the Lord was present. He had requested his baptism to be on Friday, and so it left Saturday open for.....

Another wonderful baptism. This time it was a very dear man from Columbia named Wber. He was taught by several of the Hermanas but was finally ready to be one of the first baptized in the new year. Here we have Hna Johns and Hna Fitches along with the Ward Mission Leader Rene Robles on the far left. Wber's son, Wber Jr. is on the right.

Elder Woods was practicing a song to be played for the baptism. Mikel and Wber Jr, two sons of Wber are watching. The Hermanas are teaching Wber Jr. and hopefully he will be baptized soon by his father. That is the gospel in action. But after Saturday, we were awakened to a white.....

Snowstorm in Bilbao. This is the road out from the mission home in Mungia. This was quite a storm for this part of the world. In Utah, this is your normal winter storm, but for here, this was incredible. I wish I had taken a picture, but the next day a bus slid sideways on a road coming into the subdivision and blocked the road for the morning. They do have snowplows for the main freeways, but not for the neighborhoods. They were closing roads all around us. We had to go out a back way in order to get to church. We were going to Gijon this morning but turned around when we were 20 miles out of Bilbao and realized the roads were iced over. We later found out the road to Gijon had been closed.

The skies cleared and so we invited the Belnaps and the Secretaries over for lunch. Elders Hansen and Anderson thought it would be fun to run barefoot in the snow. Elder Anderson drove home for the first time on snow. Such new adventures everyday.

3 days later all the snow is gone and life is back to normal. Actually the snow was mostly gone by Monday and the temperatures warmed back up to somewhere close to the 50's. This evening I went out teaching with the great Hermanas in Bilbao. If you enlarge the picture you will see the Guggenheim in the background. Bilbao is such a beautiful city, we love it here.