It makes me happy to hear that all is well in Zion! I´m sure that everyone will have to get used to dad being called Bishop Carpenter, but it´s all in good time. I told Presidente Oliveira about it in my weekley letter and he sends his best.
This week was kind of crazy, as usual. We had a few really cool experiences and spent lots of time visiting less-actives. I´m not sure if you remember, but we´ve had this 10 year old named Ilton come to Church for the past two weeks. His parents are members, but not active. We´ve been teaching him (and some of his sisters who aren´t very interested) and he´s been progressing a lot, but his dad was allowing him to get baptized. We decided that we needed to involve the members more (not sure why we didn´t think of this before) and we visited them with Sonia, who is the Primary President and Principal of Ilton´s school. She talked about the Primary program and how wonderful that the Church is for children and everyone in general. We showed Irmão José Ilton´s paper of things that we´d taught and would still teach before his baptism, but he was still not budging. Then, he finally decided to let Ilton get baptized after talking with him about the importance of it all and that he needed to behave himself better. It was a miracle, but he signed the form and we taught Ilton everything so that he could be baptized on Sunday! We made goals with him on how to behave himself at home and to get along with his sisters, and it´s been good. I really love this family, too. They are SUPER nice to us and won´t let us leave without giving us something to eat (despite our modest rejections). While they haven´t been active in the Church, it´s plain to see that Jose and Vanderlise have been good about raising their kids. We´re hoping that they´ll be coming back to Church as soon as Jose´s leg gets better (he´s got a big ol´ cast).
On Thursday this week, we found out that there was no lunch scheduled, so we were planning on eating some tupperware food that Irmã Josy gave us. As we left the house in the morning to teach, we taught a young man and his less-active grandparents. As we were leaving to go eat lunch at home, Irmã Clementina told us to stay and eat lunch with them. So we did! It´s good to know that the Lord is blessing us in ways that we never had planned.
The other good news of the week was while we were at Church. While planning on Saturday night, we made a goal for the next day to mark someone´s baptismal date. There were only 35 people (gasp!) at church, but one of them was an ancient investigator named Johnn, who is dating an 18 year old member. I have probably talked about him before, but he made us pretty angry a while ago. Anyways, he called me over during Church, and said that he felt that it was time for him to get baptized. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOH! We are MORE than happy to help you then guy. He said that he´d wanted time to make sure that he was making a right choice, and that now he´s felt that the Church is true and he´s made up his mind. BAPTISM ON SATURDAY!!! Yessssss. His family is from a weird Church, so we´re praying that they don´t try to mess with him.
Things are going well in Maracaju! We´re finally seeing the fruits of MANY missionaries work. I´ve also been helping them to get a choir together and I play the hymns. They don´t sing very good, but at least it´ll help the members to get to know some different hymns. Have a wonderful week! The heat will go away soon enough, but know that it´s also become really hot in Maracaju. I hope that it rains soon and gets cold again. Until next week!
-Elder Carpenter
Fotos: Ilton´s baptism with family. Sub sandwiches on P-Day in Dourados!
Brazilian Fact: Monster Energy Drinks are 7 reais, which is about $4, but that doesn´t mean that they taste any better.
No comments:
Post a Comment