FAITH and WORKS

 Day 242 - March 9, 2014

            So I think that I am going to start writing daily in my journal because there is starting to be less and less time on Sunday’s to write a summary of the week.  Unfortunately, this will be a short entry.  I am going to make a lot of changes in this next week so that I am a little more organized. I think that will my next project!  I have been working on being exactly obedient and now I think that I will work on my organizational skills.  This week was a little tiring.  I am learning a lot, that is for sure!  As far as our investigators go, things were pretty exciting this week…but not in a good way.  The ex-husband of one of the ladies that we were teaching tried to kill her…3 times.  (with a gun)  She had to move to get away from him.  I guess that this is pretty typical for Bom Jardim. 

            Anyway the rest of the week was trying to keep up with D.  He is tearing through everything that we give him!  He already wants to serve a mission and he is only 14 years old.  He even asked us if an exception could be made so that he could serve when he was 17!  We have been working with him, literally – because he likes to come with us on teaching and contacting visits. His baptism is scheduled for this week, and I am pretty STOKED about it!

            Carnival is finally over.  It wasn’t too crazy here because we're a little bit further inland, and all of the crap that goes on happens closer to the beaches. Oh one thing that I don't know if I said or not last week is that there were CROWDS in the street with sacks of flour and eggs and stuff, but we got lucky and didn't ever run into them head on, although we passed very close! However, Elder Whatcott got hit on the back of his head with an egg!!! He was pretty excited that he got to see some action, but he wasn't too happy about the egg part!

            I have been trying to play piano for the ward during meetings, but no one here can sing and the person who leads the music has trained them to sing to a specific tempo…. soooooo we still have to coordinate things a little better. I'm trying to convince him to let me play a musical number one of these days, but we'll see! I'm starting to take more pictures, but I have to be very careful!

            So one of the things that I'm learning about right now (especially with my companion) is about faith and works. He decided that we should go all out this week and hit every single one of the standards of excellence, and I couldn't say no because how would that seem? 'Nope, I don't want to work that hard' or 'Nah, we can't do that’. Soooooo, I decided to study faith this morning (something that I was lacking when it comes to hitting all of the numbers that we are supposed to). Anyways, I was studying and I realized a few things. Faith is a principle of ACTION and POWER. It is the force that empowers us to work for a worthy goal. I think that the standard of excellence is a worthy goal, so I'm going to work and develop my faith to make it happen! Faith is an EXTREMELY important principle in not only missionary work, but in our lives as well. How many of us place 'worthy goals' in our lives? It's really easy to place goals as missionaries because it's the most focused time in our lives. However, during our lives sometimes we need to take a minute, put a pause on life, and evaluate where we are. If we do this, we can realize what exactly we need to do to better ourselves. As a missionary I'm making these pauses at least every single night before I go to bed. As normal people, we should hold at least one of these 'pauses' every week. This can help us use our time more wisely during our week and be more successful.

            EIGHT MONTHS down, 16 to go, for the non-math folks that means I am 1/3 of the way through my mission!  Hard to believe. It is true what they say about the language, 6 months in country and you are reasonably fluent. About 25% of the people who I talk with on the street think that I'm Brazilian, so I'm doing really with this part of my mission.

Contrary to popular belief, there are not monkeys everywhere in Brazil!  This is the very first wild monkey that I have seen on my mission...which is already 1/3 over.

Okay, I know that this looks disgusting, but it was good!  Rice and chicken with guacamole and doritos.

America!!!

I love you all! 

Elder Colvin

PS. Congrats to Brett and Peter on their mission calls. They will be great missionaries. I am sad that it will be so long before I will get to see them again.