work

    This week we worked. I decided to talk to as many people as a could on the street. We managed to do 39 lessons in total this week. As we talk with people on the street it´s very easy to start talking about religion with them. We then ask if we can do a prayer to share a message with them. We share message of the restoration and then ask them to follow the example of Jesus Christ and be baptized. Almost every single person accepts to be baptized. I asked one lady if she felt she was ready to be baptized immediately and she said yes. I told her she wasn´t ready yet because we had some things to teach her yet. We found one person on the road who said he´s been looking for a church to join for a long time and he wants to be baptized in the church of jesus christ of latter day saints. Great! We asked him when we could visit him again and he said to come by his house the same day at 4:00pm. We ended up being late because of some othe appointments and ran into him on the road again on our to his house. He talked a lot about how he had a lot of questions concerning religion and loved the message that we had shared with him. I´m excited to visit him again. There´s a couple we´ve been teaching for a while now and they´re doing really well. We visit them every sunday night with another couple who are members. Both of the couples have a sons about 5 years old so they play in another room while we teach the lesson. For our last lesson with this couple we got them signed up on familysearch.org. It was awesome! This couple is really excited to get going on family history. Right now we are waiting for their marriage papers to come through. In brazil the marriage process is complicated. You have to pay money to get the license and you also have to post the marriage in the newspaper for about 25 days before they can be legally married. They´re super excited to get their marriage papers so they can be baptized. I´m really excited too. I just hope I don´t get transfered to another area. As of right now we have to wait about another 20 days for them to be legally married. 

       The members here in Erechim are awesome! We´re having ward council every sunday morning. All of the members are super exicted about missionary work. We´ve been getting tons of refferrals. It´s almost more referalls than we can handle. They also give us lots of food! I love food. and I love anyone who gives me food. The best people to find are members, and the best people to teach are missionaries. If you ever want a missionary to teach someone you know about the gospel it´s very simple. Invite your friend to your house and tell him you have have 2 friends in the church called missionaries who teach the gospel of Jesus Christ and that you would like for him to hear a message they have for him. This message explains how the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ was restored once more in our days. Then you call up the missionaries and ask them what hour works for them to come to your house and teach your friend. Then confirm this hour with your friend. When you talk to the missionaries schedule for them to come to your house a little early so you can talk about quickly how you want to teach the lesson. Then the friend will arrive. Then you guys teach the gospel. And then this friend will have the opportunity to follow the example of Jesus christ and be baptized if they have that desire. it´s a process that works well. If you just hand an address or telephone number of someone you know to the missionaries, nothing will probably happen. The member needs to be the one who invites the friend to meet with the missionaries. Please help the missionaries. They need it. There is no greater work than missionary work. I´m so happy to be apart of it.

      Share the gospel in all times and in all places. Every week at district meetings we recite the scripture Doctrine and Covenants 24:12 which says:" Em todos os tempos e em todos os lugares abrirá a boca e anunciará meu evangelho como com a voz de uma trombeta tanto de dia como a noite, e dar-lhe-é uma força que não é conhecida entre os homens." I feel a great power behind me when I start talking about the gospel of Jesus Christ with people. I know that this is god´s work. God will provide wonderful opportunities for those who are willing to work for him. As you work for him you will see miracles and your testimony will increase. As your testimony increases your desire to share your testimony with others increases. We have to tell people about the book of mormon. We need to let people know there´s a living prophet of god named thomas s. monson.

People need to know that they can receive personal revelation for any righteous question that they may have. Don´t worry if others don´t believe what you´re saying. What´s important is what you know to be true.

Famílias Eternas

On the mission we have the opportunity to completely change peoples´ lives. A little time before I wrote about a family that Elder Niver and I had found through doing a street contact with a lady on the road. Street contact means that we walked up to her and started talking about the gospel even though we didn´t know her. There was no physical contact. Well actually we shook hands, but that was it. Since we found this family they´ve been doing really well. There´s a mother, father, a son 4 years old and a 19 year old son. Yesterday we taught them about the Family:A Proclomation To the World. They loved it. They said they´ve been searching for a church that focuses on the family. Later we talked about baptism with them. The father shared his testimony with us about the church. He said that he´d been praying for a while to receive a material answer that this church is true and that he should be baptized. He said that he really likes the bird "pombo" I´m not really sure what kind of bird that is but I know it´s a bird. They´re not very common here in Rio Grande do Sol. One Sunday during the morning they were getting ready to go to church. The father went into his 4 year old son´s room to wake him up and there on the windowsill he saw a pombo. It was a bird sitting peacefully on the windowsill and didn´t move. At this moment the father knew that God had answered his prayers. They have continued coming to church, are reading the Book of Mormon every day, and are filled with the Holy Ghost. Great joy comes in seeing others have joy in receiving the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. The most important thing in the lives of this family is getting more involved in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints so that they can experience the blessings of truly living the gospel of Jesus Christ. Everytime we visit this family they are beaming with joy and anxiously waiting to learn more about the gospel of Jesus Christ. Even the 4 year old son jumps up and down getting excited whenever he sees us coming to their house. 2 sundays ago we had a confirmation so I was in the bishop's office getting his signature. While I was in there the 4 old son ran in asking to shake my before his family would leave. I said "Com certeza, obrigado por vindo" (Of course, thank you for coming.) Families need to here the message we have, that Christ lives and wants everyone to hear and live his teachings.

Crazy Weekend

This was a crazy weekend. This week we had transfers and I received a new companion. His name is Elder Lima. He is my first companion that does not speak English. At first I was a little nervous about this but I´ve actually been really comftorable just talking in Portuguese all the time. We worked like crazy this week running around to all of our different appointments. We didn´t knock any doors this week because I already had enough commitments planned to visit this week. Saturday we did a baptismal interview for one of our investigators. He is from Nigeria so his native language is English! Our district leader made the trip of an 1 hour and a half from Passo Fundo to Erechim Saturday morning to do the interview. He passed the interview and then we went to some appointments. at the end of the day we grapped our investigator to be baptized and walked with him to the chapel to be baptized. When we got to the church the only person there was the missionary leader. No problem. We got ready to the baptism and found out that the water in the baptismal font was cold as ice. No problem. I put on my baptismal clothes and went in the water. I walked into the font trying to keep a calm expression as to not show my investigator how cold the water was. Then my investigator entered the water and stared panicking a little bit and using words we don´t call friendly. I´m glad I´ve already baptized a few times before because I was able to get that baptism done really fast, and then we ran out of the baptismal font to get dried. Sometimes salvation is painful, but I´m glad my investgator was willing show a lot of faith. Sunday we went to church, had a delicous lunch, taught people on the road, and then went to visit the best investigators in the world. We have two investigators who are a couple about 40 years old each, and they have 2 sons, 19 and 4 years old. We have been teaching them for almost 2 months now and they´ve been to church two times already. They love the church and are really excited to be baptized. Right now they´re getting their marriage papers in order so they can be legally married. Sunday we taught them about temples and family history. We set a goal with them that they will be sealed one year from now in the temple. If they do I will be able to go and watch them be sealed one year from now! Woohoo! Thank goodness today is P-day. Doing the lord´s work drains every drop of energy you have in your body. Tchau.

Semana de Milagres. (I thought I would try Portuguese this time. Go Brazil!)

Eu pensei que eu devo escrever em Português por uma semana. Eu acho que você pode botar estas frases na google translator e isso deve dar certo. Muitos milagres aconteceram esta semana. Milagres muitos vezes são a única coisa que motivar nós como missionários. Milagres ajuda nós para lembrar que Deus ainda está conosco e quer que nós fazemos esta obra missionário. Um dia esta semana nós encontramos uma mulher na rua come quem Elder Niver fez uma contato. Nós explicamos que somos missionários da igreja de Jesus Cristo dos Santos dos Últimos Dias e queremos ajuda a família dela seguir Jesus Cristo. Nós estamos bem surpreso quando ela estava bem animado a ver nós e quis marcar um compromisso conosco por causa ela e o marido dela gustam de conversa sobre religião. ou! Isso não acontece muitos vezes. Ela começou explicar onde ela mora e decidiu para dar nós uma corana para chegar na casa dela. Nós decidimos para visitar eles no domingo e encontrar o marido dela na capela da igreja para receber uma carona. Isso aconteceu na sexta-feira. Durante esta dia eu estava bem doente e foi bem difícil para continuar andando. Nós tentamos muitos vezes esta dia a ligar para Sister Campos mas não deu certo. Quando chegamos na casa aquele noite nós aprendemos que a celular de Sister Campos estava na armário dela toda dia e ela só conseguiu ligar nós perto de 9:00 da noite. As 9 horas da noite eu foi pronto para cair morto, mas Sister Campos disse que precisamos ir para o hospital imediatamente. Então nós fomos para o hospital depois sendo perdido por um pouco tempo. La nós tínhamos que esperar muito tempo. Quando nós visitamos o médico ele decidiu que eu precisei uma teste sanguíneo e uma raio x. Eu não sei porque. Depois uma enfermeira tirou meu sangue eu tornei bem branco e comecei ver muito preto e não consegui ouvir muito bem. Quando um das enfermeiras notou isso ele pegou minha cabeça e empurrou para baixo e disse,"empurrou para cima." Isso ajudou um pouco e depois eles ofereceram me uma cadeira de rodas. Eu não quis aparecer fraco então eu levantei e disse que eu não precisei a cadeira de rodas. Isso foi uma decisão mal por causa enquanto eu estava andando eu comecei ver muito preto de novo e quase cai. Com sorte um das enfermeiras pegou um cadeira de rodas e dirigiu me para o lugar para fazer uma raio x. Eu tive que tirar meu camisa por o raio x e não tinha muito força para vestir a camisa de novo então a enfermeira depois dirigiu me para uma cama de hospital. Eu deitei e ficamos la até 12:30 da manha. Depois eu levantei recebei um novo remédio e voltamos para a casa. Chegamos na casa a um hora da manhã. estávamos cansado no próximo dia. No domingo tivemos seis pessoas que são de Haiti que quiseram ir para a igreja. dois deles aparaceram da pé e tivemos um membro quem ajudou nós levantar o outro quatro para a igreja com carro. Eles não falam muito de Português mas gustaram muito da igreja. Nós estamos planejando para batizar todos estas seis pessoas na dia 29 de Augusto. Mais tarde no domingo estávamos voltando para a capela para que pegássemos uma carona com o marido da mulher na rua quem quis que nós visitamos elas. Estávamos atrasado para encontrar o marido dela na capela mas em nosso caminho nós achamos ele no lado da rua esperando no carro dele. Ele dirigiu nós para a casa dele. Ele falou que ele estava tendo muitos dificuldades com outros igrejas e quis aprender sobre o religião mórmon. Perfeito! Nós ensinamos ele, a esposa dele, e mãe dela. O lição demorou muito tempo mas depois todos deles aceitaram para ser batizado. Eles são bem animado para aprender mais em nosso próximo visita. Deus vai dar oportunidades para as pessoas que querem servir ele. Elder Niver e Eu estamos bem animados para continuar trabalhando aqui em Erechim e vendo os milagres de Deus.

Strength from the Lord.

The mission can be very tiring, but through it all, God gives me the strength I need to do his work. This week we worked in a neighborhood called Três Vendas. The reason why we worked there this week is because the week before a random guy on the street told us to go visit people in Três Vendas and we felt that was an answer to our prayers. The work went pretty well and we found lots of people who said that they wanted to be baptized, but by the end of the week we cut everyone except one family. It´s not fun to cut people from your list of investigators, but as a missionary in Brazil you have to do it a lot.

This week we´ve seen a miracle with an investigator that we just confirmed last Sunday with the gift of the Holy Ghost. He is from Haiti and only speaks French. All of the lessons were taught to him by using a member in our ward who´s also from Haiti and knows French and Portuguese. It´s been a cool experience this week to re teach the lessons to this investigator in portuguese while having the translator translate our portuguese into french for the investigator to be able to understand. This investigator has a very strong testimony that the church is true and it´s amazing to see him go to church and love it even though all of the classes are in Portuguese. This is because he likes to feel the spirit. Every time we go to his house to teach him, he just tells us that he feels good with us there and he feels good about our message. As we´ve gone to this investigator´s house to teach him we´ve started teaching some of the other people from Haiti that he lives with. They are very open to the message and have a desire to follow Jesus Christ. 2 of them said that they will be baptized. Another person who lives in this house is from Nigeria, Africa, and he speaks english as his native language. He doesn´t know portuguese very well so we actually taught him the first lesson in English. It´s a good thing my companion and I are american. It was really weird teaching in english. This guy from Nigeria is going to be baptized later this month.

The winter has stopped and the sun is very strong here. I´m glad that God gives us miracles and gives us the strength we need to help his children return to live with him after this life.

Adventure!

This week I got transferred to a different area. It was hard saying bye to all the members I came to know really well, and not knowing where I would be going. At the same time I never felt sad. A lot of the members were kind of confused when I told them I was getting transfered and I was happy about it. I was ready to move on and experience the missionary work and a different location. So the way the transfers work is I received an email saying I was going to be transfered, but I didn´t know where to. I spent the P-Day packing and then on the next morning as I was finishing packing all of my things I grapped a bag which had my shaving razor in it. When I grabbed the bag, the blade of the razor cut through the bag and cut my left finger open. At this moment we had to go in order to make it the bus station on time. I rinsed it with water and quickly wrapped it with knapkins and baind-aids to keep myself from dripping blood everywhere. We traveled  to a big bus station near porto alegre and there I met my new zone leader and he showed me where I would be going. I found out that I would be going to the zone Passo Fundo and be working in an area called Erechim. We waited at the bus station until 12:30pm when our bus arrived to take us to Passo Fundo. Most of the trip there we were climbing up hills because Passo Fundo is about 3,000 feet above Porto Alegre. We arrived at the bus station in Passo Fundo at about 5:00pm. At around 5:30pm my new companion showed up there. His name is Elder Niver. After talking a bit we grabbed another bus to take us to Erechim. At this point, riding on another bus was making me feel like I was going to throw up, because the bus drivers here are crazy. After arriving in our area and then grabbing a taxi, we got to our apartment at about 9:00pm. That same night we went to a hospital where I got my finger checked out and it actually wasn´t too bad, there was just a lot of blood. Better safe than sorry. We live on the 8th floor in pretty nice sized apartment room. It even has couches. I only live with my companion here.  My new area Erechim is the area farthest away from Mission office in Porto Alegre. It´s great to be on the outskirts of the mission. It´s really hard to find people in Erechim who want to listen to our message, and it´s really hard to baptize here. But I believe in miracles. I really like the area especially because it´s ginormous. Our area is also full of hills and looks beautiful. It takes about 4 hours to walk from one end of our area to the other. The mission is awesome and has the best work anyone could ever be apart of.

Miracles

    Elder Fávoro and I had an amazing last week. A week before yesterday we had the opportunity to baptize a daughter of God. She´s about 40 years old and has been living alone for most of her life. She was abandoned and denied by any church that she tried going to in the past. She´s been praying and asking God if there is really any purpose to leaving the house and worshipping God in a church with other people. About 3 weeks ago is when we walked to her house and clapped. I don´t remember why we went to this house, but it just felt right. The week that we found her we had a few lessons that week with her. She had a lot of doubts about our church and had heard a lot of strange things about our church from other people. We spent a lot of time listening to her and then resolving her doubts with truth and teaching her how our church really is. Every time we would answer a question that she had she would smile and say, "That´s very different." Whenever she said that I always thought, "I know how you feel. I´m an american in Brazil." The sunday after we met her she went to church with us. We brought her there early before the meetings started to show her what the chapel looks like and what the different rooms are for. My companion did most of the touring because I was looking in the kitchen to see if there was any left over food from the last ward activity. As members started to show up to church we introduced her to some sisters in the relief society and they guided her into the relief society class. Then we attended the gospel principles class with her and then guided her to sacrament meeting for the final hour. The next time we went to visit her she actually invited us inside of her house. She said that our church was very different and that she felt better there than she had in any other church. In our previous lessons we had asked her to pray about the church of jesus christ of latter day saints and ask if it is true. She had stayed up until 4:00am praying about our church. She said that she had also had a dream a night before she went to our church. In the dream she said she was in our church. She was sitting in a group of people with everyone wearing white. She said that on an elevated surface in front of her stood another person dressed in white. I thought the dream she had was very interesting, especially since she had never been in our church at that point. After a lot of praying and dreaming she said that she had received an answer that me and companion were servants of the Lord and that the church of jesus christ of latter day saints is true. Yes! After we heard that we set a date for her to be baptized the following sunday. She accepted. Yes! The baptism went really well and a sister even made a delicous chocolate cake for afterwords. Yes! We continued to visit her after the baptism and her physical appearance was very different the first time we visited her after the baptism. She was glowing with light, smiling more, more confident in her speech, and had an even firmer testimony about this church. During the week after she was baptized she said she had a lot of people from other churches on the road and at her door invite her to go to their churches. She said no to all of them because she already knows which church is true. We explained to her that because she was baptized in the true church she´s showing God that she´s on His side now, and saitan doesn´t want her to continue going to this church. That is why so many people invited her to go to another church. She said that never in her life has she had people invite her to go to their churches until the after she was baptized in this church. Yesterday was the day we confirmed upon her the Gift of the Holy Ghost. Every time we visited this lady she had always prayed about last message we left with her and had the Book of Mormon and the last pamplet that we had left for her on the table. She always read the entire pamphlet and any part of the Book of Mormon that we had left for her to read. I know that if you have a sincere desire to find truth and follow the Holy Ghost, you will find the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day saints to be the only true church on the Earth.

     About a month ago Elder Fávoro and I were doing contacts on the street and met somebody who had just moved into Matthis Velho, the city where we live, a few months ago. He´s been studying different religions but never really settled in one religion because he always felt something was missing. He´s here living next to his parents studying to become a lawyer. To talked to him for a while and I was shocked at how nice he was. My companion said it´s because he´s from a small town. By the time we finished talking to him we had taught him a good part of the first lesson, said a prayer with him, marked a day to go visit, got his phone number, and he even asked to add us on facebook. The day we marked to go back we ended up having a different commitment and we never visited him, and we forgot to call him to set up another appointment. We thought it would probably be better to just focus on the investigators we already have and not worry about visiting him. One day we were walking down the main road to go visit people and were some screaming at us from behind. We turned around and saw a man leaning out of the entrance to a salon waving his arm at us to come over to him. It was the same man that we had met a few weeks earlier. He invited us into his house and we taught him the message of the restoration. We left him with an invite to read the pamplet about the message we left and read a part of the Book of Mormon that we marked for him. The next time we visited him that week we met his parents. We learned that his Dad was actually already baptized in the LDS church and is relatives with a family that goes to church in our ward. He hasn´t gone to church in a long time and his wife isn´t a member. We talked a little bit with them and they said that would like to get married legally and start going to the LDS church. Their son who we had met before said that he read what we had left for him, but he didn´t read the part we marked in the Book of Mormon for him, instead he read Moroni chapter 10, which is a perfect chapter to read, because it´s a chapter that bears testimony of the Book of Mormon. We came back to visit them the next Sunday, but his parents weren´t home, so we went into his house to talk some more. He showed us that he had continued reading in the book of mormon and he is only a few chapters away from finishing first Nephi. He said he spent a lot of time reading the Book of Mormon and he marked some of his favorite parts. During his study he compared the Book Mormon with the Bible and told us that the Book of Mormon is the word of God. He said as long as the Book of Mormon continues to be in accordance with what´s in the Bible, he´ll keep reading it. We talked with him for a long time that day. He told us a lot about what he believes in and shared some of his doubts about our church. We bore testimony to him about the importance of prophets who receive revelation and the power of the priesthood. He continued to talk saying the God has to have a plan for us after we die. He said we have to have a plan of salvation. Elder Favoro and I looked at each other smiling, and we handed him the Plan of Salvation pamphlet. We also invited him to pray about our church and ask if it is true. He said he will. After the lesson he showed us all of the books he had, because he really likes to read. As he was showing us his books he finally pulled and old looking book out from the bottom of the pile and said,"this is the best of them all" It was princples of the gospel book the church of jesus christ of latter day saints produced for the principles of the gospel classes. He was really amazed when we showed him that he favorite book was produced by our church and included the story of Joseph Smith seeing Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father. I´m looking forward to visiting him again. Never stop being humble. Never stop studying. Never stop following the Holy Ghost. And you will be lead to the truth.