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Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Mother's Day joy!

We talked to Zach on Mother's Day. He sounded really good. Except for his feet getting major blisters he is feeling fine. He says the people in his area are really good to him. They feed him a lot when they eat lunch with them. Zach is happy to be working hard! Here is his letter the day after Mother's Day.

Well, like I told you yesterday, we had 2 baptisms yesterday. My first baptism! It was pretty weird to actually be the one baptizing, but thankfully I didn´t mess up the words or anything. Afterwards, I was all smiles. I couldn´t stop! Now, we are just hoping that the sister and mom and brother of the 2 will get baptized too. Katia (sister) has a baptism date for this Saturday, and we´re still working with Wellington to get permission from his aunt to get baptized. We are praying for a miracle! Also, we taught this one guy a week ago who accepted a baptism date for the 22nd and he accepted everything, 1st Vision, reading, everything, but we have yet to catch him. He works as an ambulance driver and his work hours are just whenever they call. We also have 2 brothers and a friend of theirs with a baptism date for the 22nd. They are pretty cool, but they need to read the scriptures, haha. Sunday was kind of sad because we have lots of investigators, but none of them came to Church, only 2. Because it was really cold yesterday (and this morning/today it was 68-70 degrees!) they all gave lame excuses for not going. That´s one of the problems with people, they are all really cool and accept the commitments to read and go to Church but hardly any of them actually do it. I´m pretty sure that this is the same problem that all missionaries have. But we have our work cut out for us!

Well, it feels good to be a missionary. It´s weird because it´s different from what I expected. You aren´t constantly having spiritual experiences, but you do have them. A lot of it is just teaching people the basic, beautifully simple doctrines of the Church. You don´t have to teach in grandeur or majesty, only with the Spirit. Because I´m teaching in Portuguese I have no choice but to keep things simple, and I´m very grateful for that. I´m afraid that I would complicate things too much if I taught in English. And it´s also just about not being lazy and going out and visiting/teaching your investigators. It´s really up to you (or the senior comp, in reality) what gets done. Thankfully, we work hard, because that´s how I like it. And Portuguese seems to be coming to me as well! I was talking with 16 year old from the other branch in Vilhena last night, and I told him I was from the U.S. and he said he thought I was Brazilian! I was so excited. It was night time so I probably looked darker, but it made me feel really good.

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