Family trip to Spain

My wife and I met in Algeciras, Spain in 1995.  She was from Mexico, and I was from Upstate New York.  Our respective churches supported two missionary brothers.  They were Mexican-born Americans whose parents were missionaries to Mexcio.  One brother has a church in central Mexico near the city where my wife used to lived.  The other brother started a mission work in southern Spain and northern Morocco.

My church supported the brother that lived in Spain.  I had traveled with him to Spain and Morocco in 1991.  We visited all the main cities in Morocco, including Tangier, Fez, Rabat, Casablanca, and Marrakech.  In 1995, I was invited to return with this brother to Spain to see how the mission work was progressing.  There were 15 people there from his brother’s church in Mexico, one of them was my wife-to-be.

Ten years later, almost to the day, we were able to return to Algeciras, Spain along with a group from our church that did ministry in local churches, on the streets, and on the beaches.  We traveled to Gibraltar, Granada, Malaga, Seville, Algeciras, Tarifa, and finally, Madrid.  It was late June, early July, and it was hot.  Early afternoon in old-town Seville felt like 135º F.

In Granada, we were cooled down with a misting device that sprayed us from small pipes over our heads that made us feel like produce in our local grocery store, but it was welcomed relief from the heat.  We started our tour of the Alhambra in the early evening, but it was still way way above 100º F.

We visited the small town of Antequera, and ministered in a theater there.  We stayed some of the time in the garage of a pastor we met on this trip.  We showed up, and he let us in.  We also stayed in a hostel in San Roque, which gave us a nice view of Gibraltar from our rooftop.

Our group was allowed to minister in the old part of Torremolinos at a open-air festival that a council of churches there had worked for at least a year to get permission to have “church” songs and skits in the open square.  That went on for three days and was one highlight of the trip.  We worked with another local church near the beach in Malaga, and did some open-air worship songs and skits. 

In Estepona, we worked with yet another church and went out on the board walk two nights in a row with our team.  In Madrid, near the Puerta del Sol, center of the city, we assisted a local evangelical group as they went into the square and held open-air meetings.