Baptism!

MY NEW(sort of) SHOES!!! I took them to a shoe guy, and he fixed them up really nicely. These are the same shoes that i sent pictures of with giant holes in the bottom. I'm very happy.

April 13, 2015

Picking up the contact lenses actually didn’t take that long, but we still didn’t get back until 12:00 so that was annoying.  Also, I almost threw up on the bus ride home.  Seriously, the buses here are crazy.  I never got car sick, but this gets me bad.  We met up with Elder L. Lopes in Elder Shelton’s old area because I went to fix my other pair of shoes.  Bad news, it was raining like crazy!  Sadly, umbrellas only protect you from the waist up.  The rain is so strong that your pants get soaked.  Anyways, I took my shoes to the repair shop and the other Elders will pass by there and pick them up later.

The mission secretaries asked me to give them pictures of me to put in the slideshow that they put on for the missionaries who are leaving.  As I was looking through old pictures I saw a conversation that I had with my mom a long time ago about my good shoes having a warranty.  I hope that warranty will still work because those shoes are destroyed but I really like them. (Turns out that the warranty was still in effect and Mr. Mac sent me brand new shoes to mail to Elder Colvin!)

        Work today was pretty much a total fail, everything fell through.  Even the recent convert forgot about our appointment…ughh! 

April 14, 2015

         We finished teaching everything to M. today, and she is a little bit nervous about her baptism, but she is super ready. We also were able to teach our recent convert and help him with some concerns that he is having. 

April 15, 2015

         Missionaries can be kind of annoying sometimes.  Elder Cooper changed the baptism interview to an hour earlier at the last minute so we had to try to get a hold of M. to tell her.  We couldn’t find her anywhere. We checked her apartment, the lan house, her friend’s house, and finally her sister’s house where we found out that she was actually babysitting.  We were able to talk with her and she had enough time to make it to the interview before she had to pick up her babysitting kids from school at 3:30.

         On our way to the stake center we saw a guy try to steal a lady’s purse.  Actually, he was on a motorcycle with his girlfriend and he just reached out and grabbed the purse.  Luckily for the lady her strap broke and she ended up with the purse in her hands.  We kept hurrying on to the stake center and made it there at 2:40 so that gave her about 40 minutes before she had to leave to pick up the kids.  Then we started the waiting, and the waiting, and the waiting.  M. asked me about every three minutes what time it was because she was nervous that she would have to leave to pick up the kids. Well finally the district leaders showed up at 3:20…but by that time we didn’t have time for the interview. So I arranged to have the DL’s go to the our chapel after M. picked up the kids and meet us there. Unfortunately the DL got lost and he didn’t show up until 4:40.  Then he spent over an hour in the interview….in the end, it all worked out and M. is ready for her baptism on Friday.

April 16, 2015

         Today we had interviews with President Bonini and he basically confirmed what my Mom said was the reason for our trio.  He told me that it is necessary for not and he told me to just be patient.  Yeah. I also talked to him about the problems that we are having with getting people to follow through with commitments.  He didn’t really have any solid solutions for me, but he did explain why this happens so much in Brazil.  It is because people here see “church” as the end of everything when it comes to God. You just have to join a church but you don’t have to actually attend church.  We are trying to teach them that there is much more to it than that and it is culturally hard for them to accept that.  Anyway, the interviews took WAY TOO LONG.  We were supposed to go in at 10:30 and we didn’t end up getting called in until 12:00.  That meant that we didn’t get home until 3:30. 

April 17, 2015

         We found a pretty cool family today, but the only problem is that the father works on Sundays right now.  That is one of the hardest problems to overcome when it comes to getting people to church.  Other than that, they seemed very open and I invited them to be baptized.   
         In other good news, M. was baptized today!  The service took a while because the bishop likes to talk a LOT.  Bishop talked about exaltation in his welcome to the ward spheal, and he bascially interviewed her before she got baptized. He does that and it almost seems like he tries to scare them out of being baptized by saying 'this is a really serious thing that you're about to do, are you sure you want to do it?' We only ever baptize that say yes, so it's no big deal.

M. chose me to perform the ordinance and everything turned out well.

 

M.'s baptism was this week and the youth have really helped us out a lot with her. She was a little nervous, but it all went down without a hitch.

The trio!

April 18, 2015

         Today we have been visiting people with the young men in the ward.  Everything fell through except until we started working with Denis.  He has been a member for a little over a year now and he told us that he had just finished his first 24 hour fast!  So with him along for the lessons, every single one of them worked out AND they all ended up giving us food!  One of our less active members talked to us about how she never remembers to pray.  So I asked her if I could set an alarm on her phone so that she could remember.  I think that will work for her because she is in love with her cell phone.  We have a lot of investigators and less active members who struggle with wasting time with electronics, as well as getting mixed up with inappropriate content. I am really glad that my mom and dad were strict about limiting our use of electronics, especially video games, ipods, and cell phones.  I am pretty sure that I will be just as strict.

April 19, 2015

         So one thing that I didn’t write in my journal was when I felt inspired to contact this guy on the other side of the street a couple of days ago.  The only problem was that he was going the opposite direction.  I told Elder Shelton and Elder Carmo, “Hold up, I am going to contact that guy.”  He was walking really super fast and I basically had to chase him down.  I have to admit that I was a little disappointed because it wasn’t one of those “WOW” contacts.  But, it turned out that he is friends with Denis, and Denis brought him to church today!  He is super shy, but the youth in the ward really welcomed him and he seemed to really like church.  M. was confirmed today and we had a pretty good turnout.  Also, the stake leadership here said that we need to start having ward council meetings every week and that the missionaries are supposed to be in charge of it….WHAT?  Okay…so today we had our first ward council meeting and we brought a video to share and planned to discuss the needs of our investigators.  But, the bishop had other plans and he didn’t want to talk about our work so we just sat and watched the video.  We did talk about strengthening recent converts a little bit, but there weren’t any concrete plans made to help anyone.  We were pretty discouraged until we met up with our recent convert N.   He was excited to tell us about a surprise plan that the young men have to help Denis go to the temple with his mom this summer.  The young men are going to sell clothes to get money to pay for Denis to go to Recife.  This little bit of news made me feel hope for the future of the church here in this area.  I love the youth here!