I love Brazil

Right now I´m in the city Santa Cruz with my companion who´s a brazilian from the northern region. Santa Cruz is known in brazil as the city of germans. Work recently with my new companion has gotten a lot better. My new companion is a great missionary and already has 1 year and 7 months on the mission, so he has a lot of experience. I´m really excited to learn with him. This week we were able to teach 46 lessons. That felt really good. There´s so many opportunities to teach people here. We teach them on the road, at the door, in the house, or ate the gate, or in any location basically. One day we decided to go tracting in the country of santa cruz and we met quite of few germans. A lot of them actually recognized my name Elder Ritter as a german name and started talking in german with me thinking that I would understand what they were saying. In this part of the city they even teach german to all of the kids in elementary school. It´s cool to see the german culture they carry.

During the past couple weeks I´ve been learning a principle that´s helped me a lot as a missionary. One of the principle purposes of life is love and happiness. They are linked together. If we are happy it´s because we love. Life will always have rules that we need to follow. There will always be a system that works better than the other. We will always think that some person is better than the other, that one country is better than the other, that one way of being is better than the other. But we have to be careful to not judge and simply love. A person can be happy in any place and any situation if he decides to be that way. A person can love anyone if he decides to be that way. Happiness does not come from your surroundings but self principles within you. This past week I started writing more in my journal about all the blessings and miracles I had seen that day, and thinks I love about where I am and the people around me. It´s easy to criticize, or complain, but this doesn´t help in anything. We have to be ever searching to love everyone around us and look for the blessings in every situation. We must be obedient to the gospel with exactness but at the same time we have to love others. We have to be careful to not be like the Farisees who just strictly followed the law moses looking for self praise, but forgetting about the real purpose of that law. I´m so glad that we have a god of love and mercy.

Most brazilians have been an excellent example to me in charity. They always put others before themselves, share everything they have, and spend time to strenghten relationships with their family and friends. They have a way to talk in a very kindly manner and be very warm and welcoming to others. I hope that everyone can follow this example and realize that happiness comes from serving others and not from self pleasure. Use everything you have to help others because it was God you gave it to you.