Brujula

Querida familia y Amigos,
     I'm sorry I haven't written a ton of details, but I will try to feel you in now.

     Cádiz is a city of miracles.
     Okay, rewind.
     Like my first week here Hna Volpe brought me to a cita with a menos activa. Name: Mari Angeles. Hermanas have been visiting her house once a week for like 15 years now and she hasn't been to church once within those fifteen years.
     She was too busy to talk to us, so I asked if maybe we could come back the next week and watch a movie with her. Her husband's whole family was there and so I invited everybody but they kind of laughed at me and made some jokes about watching another movie about Joseph Smith And I was like "awkward, it was going to be a movie about Joseph Smith." So then I told them all that we could watch a different movie, and to just show up. Then we went home and panicked because the only other cool church movies we have in Spanish are either really girly or about Jospeh Smith. So we returned the next week with the plan to watch Saints and Soldiers. Neither of us had acuçtually ever watched it before. We got there and little surprise only her and her husband, Manolo, were there.
Basically it was a disaster. we didn't even have time to finish the whole movie. And as we left I told her that we were going to have an activity on Saturday in the capilla. She said, "no" right off the bat. But then Hna Volpe told her that it was my birthday, so then she asked me if I was really just inviting her to my birthday party and I was like... "yes?" and she told she would come!
     And she came! It was a miracle! She had never even been in that chapel because it was built about twelve years ago.
     And then she showed up the next day to church!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
     I did a little dance in the hallway after church when she left.
     And she has not missed a week since.
     We have no idea what changed, or why she has suddenly reactivated herself. But Heavenly Father has let us watch the gospel change her life for the second time. She has to quit smoking and she will officially be açcounted as "rescued" and will be ready for a calling. She told me she didn't smoke even one cigarette yesterday, so it's going to happen. And about three weeks ago we saw her non-member brother-in-law (Luis) walking down the street and invited him to come to church and he came just like that. The next week he brought his inactive brother with him. We started meeting with him last week and he is GOLDEN.
     Tuesday, he asked us what he had to do to be Mormon and we taught him about baptism, then invited him to be baptized on the 15th and he accepted! Then we met with him again on Thursday (we teach him on a bench outside of McDonald's because he is a single man and lives alone) and gave him a calender with the baptism date and a list of what we were going to teach him before and he kind of flipped and told us he wasn't ready, and so we asked if we could meet him again on Saturday in the chapel so that we could show him the baptismal faunt and talk more about what it means to be baptised.
     Saturday we had a member from Chiclana come with us (she just got her mission call to Argentina, woohoo!) and we had a really spritual lesson in front of the baptsimal fount about the Atonement and how we can use the Atonement by being baptized and through repentance and that is the only way to be free from sin. Afterwards, the member asked him how he felt about meeting with us and he told her the story about how we invited him to be baptized, but he had a lot of doubts. And then he told her that it seemed like now all of his doubts had disappeared.
     He came to church yesterday and was inviting people to his baptism.
I am just so happy.
     And now I literally have no time.
I love you all,
Hermana Ashby