Charades and Popcorn Popping

It is Sunday night here in Madrid. We have had a busy week in the temple with the wonderful saints from Portugal. They came on buses and cars and stayed the whole week going to sessions, doing baptisms and initiatories. It was a wonderful week! We are so grateful to be here and be around the great people from Spain, France, Portugal and Italy. We have scared and faith promoting experiences everyday. One Stake President and his wife and daughter came from Portugal. They are all trained temple workers and they speak English which helps us a lot. Language continues to be our biggest challenge. I can safely say that no one in our family can beat be at charades because I have to use hand motions and gestures all the time to communicate. It is an interesting thing that we are here doing what we are doing with our limited abilities but the Lord has qualified us for this scared work. We had to say goodbye to our group of missionaries tonight. We all shed tears and felt a little sad. They are ready to go and do a great work for the Lord. They sang tonight for the General Authority Elder Lopez and did an excellent job. He said it was easy to speak to them after such great music. We are so proud of them. 3 of the Spanish Elders came to our door with a tee shirt they had written on for us with their names and thanking us for helping them with music. It really is incredible how much we do with music training. The hymns of the restoration are powerful tools for sharing the gospel. I even played the m&m game with them naming the hymns like in the TV show, Name that Tune. They loved it! Popcorn Popping was a hit! We went to a concert last night in Alcala. It was really very good. We had choirs, violin, piano, vocal and instrumental which made a very nice time for a full crowd at the chapel. We had to ride a train and then the metro but we found our way just fine. The transportation in Spain is outstanding and because we are old we get discounts. We leave tomorrow for a 9 day trip with 3 other couples to see Zaragosa, Barcelona, Valencia and Alicante. We will travel by train. The hostel is pretty empty because the temple is closed for 2 weeks so all the missionaries for the temple have left on trips