Semana Santa in Sotogrande, April 15-25 and the following week back in Madrid, April 26-29

Wow.  I feel like I could write so much about the ten days we spent in Sotogrande for Semana Santa.  Where to start…

Well we packed up and left on Friday morning and drove the 7 hour trip from Madrid to Sotogrande.  Before going, all I knew was that we were going on vacation to a beach on the southern coast of Spain.  So Bree and I loaded up the car with Ines (the mom) and the three oldest kids.  Javier and Mariana took the train.  The drive was nice.  We drove straight down the middle of the bottom half of Spain, so I got to see a lot of the different landscapes that Spain has to offer.  Bree sat in the back with the kids and watched movies with them while I sat in the front with Ines and got a lot of reading for my thesis done.  (But unfortunately I still have so much to do…let’s not talk about that…)

So we arrived at Sotogrande around 7pm on Friday.  Every day at Sotogrande was pretty similar.  Bree and I woke up when we heard the first of the kids stirring around the house, which was usually Mariana around 9:00.  We kept her entertained and quiet until the other kids and the parents got up and we had breakfast around 10.  Then we usually took the kids outside to play until lunch around 2:30.  Sometimes the older kids would go play golf or go for a bike ride with their friends, but we were always at least with Mariana.  After lunch we would go out and play with the kids again until about 7:30, when it was time for them to shower, put on their pjs, and then we had dinner around 8:30.  (I think Bree and I are finally starting to get used to the Spanish eating schedule. Maybe.)  Then we would either watch a movie, play Apples to Apples, or play wii until bedtime (usually around 11).

The family’s vacation house in Sotogrande is very similar to their house in Madrid, just a little smaller.  But they have a guest room with bunk beds and that is where Bree and I stayed.  The neighborhood where they live there is full of families with very similar lifestyles.  All the families who live around them in Sotogrande are also their friends who live in the same community in Madrid.  Most of families have numerous kids, many of which go to school with the kids of our family.  So there were always lots of friends to play with.  And Ines’s parents also have a vacation house down the street, where Ines’s sister also stays with her husband and two sons (Alvaro and Juan) and their Nanny (Anka).  So they have family right down the street.  Alvaro is Javier’s age, so they played together  every day.  Those two boys play soccer for hours upon hours every day.  They also play a lot of wii.  Juan is about 2 and is so cute.  Anka, their nanny is from Romania and has been working for their family for 3 years.  She’s 22 and so Bree and I had a good time playing with the kids with her.  We all played soccer, handball, wii, played on the playground, went for walks, things like that.

 

Not every day was exactly the same.  We did some different things a few days.  We went to mass on Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter.  We also went to the beach for a couple hours two days (the only two days it was nice enough outside, but definitely still too cold to swim). One day Mariana had some friends come over, so we went to the store with Ines and bought painting supplies for them.  This ended up attracting the whole neighborhood and every kid around ended up in our yard with a paint brush.  Also, the day before Easter Mariana and Javier had an Easter party, which was so much fun. It was PACKED with tiny children and Easter egg hunts, games, food, and lots of chocolate.  I took a ton of pictures at the party.

 

Easter Sunday was pretty similar to every other day there too.  We went to mass in the morning, but other than that nothing was different.  This was pretty weird for me because I also do a lot with my family on Easter.  Easter is my favorite holiday.

Now that I’ve summarized what we did with the family on the trip, I’ll share a little about what God was teaching me personally.  First of all, He has been revealing to me a lot of sin in my life and convicting me to work at getting rid of it.  Well, reading St. Teresa’s autobiography at such a time in my life is very timely because she is EXTREMELY humble.  I have been learning so much from her about humility and the way the Kingdom of God works.  Every few sentences she remarks that she has done nothing and there is no good in her at all, save the good God has been pleased to put in her for the purpose of bringing Him glory; so therefore all the credit and praise is due Him.  Her humility is the very reason God could trust her with such great spiritual experiences as He did—because she wouldn’t become prideful about them and think that she did anything to deserve them.  One of the things God has been convicting me of is how I’ve been the opposite of this.  I’ve been so prideful to think that I can do anything good on my own.

 

Anyway, He has just been calling a lot of sin in my life to attention and telling me it needs to go if I want to go deeper in my relationship with Him.  So by the time Saturday rolled around (just over a week of being there) I was starting to feel discouraged.  I kept seeing all these things in my life that are contrary to how Jesus lived, things that produce bad things rather than the things of God.  Although I was trying to stop doing the bad things, I kept failing.  Then when I was going to bed on Saturday night God told me that tomorrow I was going to see a breakthrough—on Easter!

 

For this reason, Easter was not just another normal day in Sotogrande for me.  Whenever I thought about Jesus raising from the death—defeating sin, death, Satan, and all of Hell once and for all—I could hardly contain my excitement.  As I had realized the few days leading up to Easter, I am powerless to stop sinning on my own.  As a human, I am a slave to sin.  However, as a Christian, I am free to live in righteousness!  I have victory over sin and death because of what Jesus did on the cross!  He, being sinless and absolutely perfect—the only human being to ever live through the world’s temptations without sinning, took my sin, guilt, shame, and punishment upon Himself and died and took my place in Hell.  But because He is God and because He never gave into sin, Satan had no power over Him and He defeated him when He rose from the dead.  And just because He loves us, not because we have done anything to earn or deserve it, we can share in that same victory over sin and Hell.  That is the Gospel.  That is the power of God. That is love.

God was speaking so many Scripture verses to me about this over the next few days. They were absolutely blowing my mind. 

1 Corinthians 15:55 – “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

Romans 5:10 – “For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!”

Colossians 2:9-15 – “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, ¹⁰ and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority. ¹¹ In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, ¹² having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. ¹³ When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, ¹⁴ having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. ¹⁵ And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”


Ephesians 2:4-6 – “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, ⁵ made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. ⁶ And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.”

Galations 5 (the whole chapter!) especially the end where Paul contrasts the fruit that the flesh produces verses the fruit of the Spirit.  SOO MUCH BETTER!

So that was my Semana Santa in Spain.  Not what I was expecting, but so much better because God revealed the power of the cross to me a little more.  There is still infinitely more power in the cross than I will ever be able to understand while I am on earth, but this experience I lived through brought me a new level of revelation of the cross.  Thank you Jesus!  Thank you Father! Thank you Holy Spirit!

Oh, and God was also been showing me a few things about the Catholic Church.  So far during my life I have seen a lot more people on whom the Catholic Church has had a negative impact than positive, but these past few weeks God was showing me more of the good.  Reading St. Teresa’s life and going to mass with the family, I’ve been seeing a lot of things that I really like and am impressed with.

We got back from Sotogrande on Monday evening.  Since I don’t have class on Tuesdays, Bree and I spent the morning using the internet and finishing up homework for our classes.  I worked on my thesis a little bit too.  We walked down the street to find some lunch.  We bought a loaf of fresh-baked bread and a package of lunchmeat and sat on a bench in front of a Residencia de Mayores (a senior citizen home).  We ended up sharing our sandwich with one of the residents and made conversation with a couple others while feeding the pigeons.  Then we spent the evening with the kids when they got home from school.  Wednesday and Thursday I had class all day and spent the evening with the kids.

At the request of my big brother, I’m going to write a little bit about my classes. I love them.  I’m taking 3 literature classes and a grammar class.  All of my classes are completely in Spanish, but my classmates are all other foreigners, not Spaniards.  A few are from Latin American countries, but most of them aren’t native Spanish speakers.  I have classmates from Japan, China, Russia, France, Germany and other places. I love communicating with people in Spanish who have different native languages.  It’s fascinating.  My literature classes are from 10-2:30 on Wednesdays and Thursdays and my grammar class is from 3-5 on Thursdays and Fridays.  My literature classes are Nuevas Tendencias en Literatura Española, Comentario de Textos, and Literatura Española.  The classes cover essentially the same topics as my graduate classes at UC, but require less work.  Like, we just read parts of novels and our professor summarizes them for us, rather than reading the whole novel and we’ll just read a few key poems from a poet, rather than his complete collection of poems. Needless to say, I like this way much better.  J  But my professors are all fantastic.  They are very enthusiastic about what they are teaching and make things very interesting.  I really like their style of teaching.  They make it very easy to participate in class discussions, which I used to hate doing.  My grammar class is a review of subjunctive, which I thought I had a pretty good handle on, but am finding out that I really don’t, so it’s good that I am re-learning and practicing it.  I am very content with my classes.  Now if I could just get this thesis done…  I appreciate prayers for it please!

 

Friday morning Bree and I went for a run and did some abs and chin-ups in the park by the house.  That was my first time working out since I’ve been here—a whole month!  Then we took the bus to the station in Moncloa where we tried to buy our monthly pass (abono) for the bus and metro for May, but they were out.  So we went to Puerta del Sol and ate at our favorite restaurant Pitas and Company, where we got pitas for a euro.  So good and cheap.  It brought us back to our hostel-living days, where we stayed in 4 different hostels all very close to Puerta del Sol.  I kind of felt like we were back at home.  Then we went to another station there to buy our abonos.  Bree couldn’t buy hers because she didn’t have a copy of her passport.  I just happened to have one.  I’m not sure why we need our passports to buy a transportation pass.  Anyway, now I can take the bus and metro as much as I want and make as many transfers as I want without worrying about the price.  That way it should be easier to find a more effective route to school – one that doesn’t take as long and one where we don’t have to walk as far.  Then we went to Corte Ingles, the only super market chain in Madrid, so the only place that sells cheap groceries (one of our favorite places) and bought a liter of tiramisu flavored ice cream that we split and ate on the metro.  Everyone was judging us for eating that huge container of ice cream on the metro!  Then we felt sick after eating it all.  Looking back, that was probably a mistake, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  Then we went to class from 3-5 and went home to spend the evening with the family.  Friday night was a pretty normal evening with the family.  We walked with the kids to the candy shop, at dinner, and watched a movie.

This morning Bree and I took the kids swimming at an indoor public pool down the street from the house.  It was pretty fun swimming with them.  I also did a few laps.  I wasn’t able to do much because Bree and the kids were waiting and the pool was pretty crowded.  I only did about a 200 and it made me tired!  Oh my goodness, I am so out of shape!  But it definitely felt good to swim again.  It’s been a month since I’ve swam too.  It’s so weird to go so long without swimming.  Then we came home and had lunch and played soccer with the boys in the yard, had dinner, watched a movie with the kids while the parents went to have dinner with some friends.  Now I am here typing this at 1am, and am going to go to bed.

Love and miss you all!