Justin got punked!

3/9  So I got totally punked this week. We were walking through a little plaza in the center of town, and we got stopped by a policeman. He asked us for our residency cards and documents and stuff, and was really giving us a hard time. He was mostly picking on me, and at the time, I couldn't figure out why. He asked us what we were doing here, and so I told him we were missionaries for our church. He asked us if we had any sort of permission to be doing what we were doing, but when we showed him the paper signed by the prophet, he said that that didn't have authority here. It came to the point where my companion told me to call the bishop of our ward, whom I still hadn't met. Turns out the policeman is the bishop! Such a punk, but it was really funny looking back at it. He told me that he does that prank with every new missionary that comes through. I got to know bishop a little bit better on Sunday, and he is one of the funniest guys I have ever met! He is also really, really good at working with the missionaries, so I am really excited to serve with him here.

Vilafranca is actually a pretty tiny city, but our area is huge!! It covers about 6 cities, and they are all pretty far apart. Right now everything is pretty dead because of winter, but when spring comes along, things will be so beautiful around here. The members here are super helpful, and invite us over for eating visits and family home evenings with investigators all the time! I am so pumped to get to know everyone. Another funny thing, because the city is so small, the missionaries are pretty well known in most of the stores and we run into a ton of people that already know us on the streets.

One day this last week, we tried contacting a black man, but he told us he was in a hurry, but told us we could talk to his friend that just happened to walk by right then. So we spoke to him, and he turned out to be really interested, and accepted a Book of Mormon and set a visiting appointment. When we came by another day to visit with him, he had 4 other friends over, and they all sat in on our lesson about the Book of Mormon. We gave them all a book, and they all said they would read the introduction before our next visit. That was a really big miracle, because it helped us reach our goal to have 6 new investigators in the week.