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.

Crazy Stuff

So starting off, Monday night we got robbed. Some idiot broke into our house in the middle of the night. For some reason he has a the key to our neighbor´s gate/fence, so he was able to jump the wall that divides the two houses, open our window, bend one of the metal bars, and walk in. So on my table I had a 20 reais bill drying, my pot full of about 200 reais, my bose speaker, Ipod, and Camera. But the robber just grabbed a backback, dvd player, wallet, 2 pairs of tennis shoes, and some bread. I don´t know how he didn´t grab any of my stuff, but it was a miracle. Our house has two floors and we sleep on the top floor. Where the thief broke in is on the first floor. Luckily my companion had decided to sleep on the first floor this time. He normally sleeps at the top, but I think him sleeping at the bottom helped to scare away the thief. Anyway that was stressful. Not a lot of cool stuff happened this week. It rained a lot. I´m super tired. No one opens their doors in this area. 

Last P-Day we went journeying in the middle of the jungle in search for monkeys. We didn´t find monkeys but at least we found some cool waterfalls. Brazil is very green and really has beautiful plants.

Santa Cruz

So since the last time I wrote quite a few changes have happened. I was transfered from the city Rio Pardo to Santa Cruz. I was called to be District Leader of a district with 10 missionaries. I´m working in the northern half of the city Santa Cruz. This area is completely different then anywhere I´ve ever worked. Santa Cruz is known in Brazil as the city of Germans. Most of the people here are of german heritage. It´s different seeing everyone with the same skin color as me. This city is also very rich. My area has no vilas, or favelas, are hardly doesn´t have any small wooden houses. There´s no dirt roads, and I don´t see huge piles of garbage on the sides of the road. It´s actually kind of nice beeing in this city. I don´t get home with my shoes and pants covered in mud. The tough part about this area is that almost no one accepts you into their house to share a message. Knocking doors does not work here. The first two days we spend entirely knocking doors, and during these 2 days about 5 people accepted to hear our message. This is very different than in my last area where I could spend 2 days knocking doors and teach 18 lessons, and have most of them accept us to come back. For now we´re teaching a couple who are preparing to be married to get baptized. That´s about it. One day while on the road we heard a man yell at us in English. My companion is a brazilian and didn´t understand what he said. He yelled Hey come here. I know the mormons. Come into my house. When I turned to look at who it was. It was a big white shirtless fat guy standing in his front patio with a huge samurai sword in his hand. That was weird. So we went up to talk to him. He only continued to talk in English with me while I translated for my companion what he was saying. He invited us to come into his house, but I was feeling strange, so we entered anyway. He has a huge house and all of the light were turned off. It was very dark. He showed a lot of things in his house. He said that he knows how to speak 12 languages. He spent a long time working on a cruise ship. He showed me that he has tons of money and told me that anything I want that´s his, he will give me. He offered us to use his TV, computers, speakers, or anything we wanted. He had a laugh that sounded like a crazy villan. He began to tell us that he has great power and even enought power to control the weather. He asked us why we were there and if we believed in Jesus Christ. He then said that we would not be able to teach him anything because he already knows everything. He talked a lot and hardly didn´t let us say anything. I was certain that this guy was possessed by the devil. I told him that we were leaving and we left. My companion was also certain that this guy is possessed by some evil spirit. We decided to go back with 2 more missionaries and expel this spirit. In the 2nd visit we could clearly see that he really wasn´t possessed. He was just crazy because he´s taking tons of pain medications for back pains. These 2 missionaries laughed quite a bit seeing that we had already told all of the missionaries in the zone that we had found a man possessed by evil spirits that we were going to expulse. We ended up visiting this man a few more times. One day he asked me for the book of mormon which I gave to him. We came back the next day and he said he had read the entire book. What!? He only sleeps 4 hours a day and doesn´t do anything, so I guess that´s possible. But he had marked quite a few parts in the book and told us about some of the things he had leanred, so I think he really read the entire book in 24 hours. I will have to try that sometime. Unfortinately we had to stop teaching him because he deosn´t want to live the law of chastity and hasn´t been able to go to church on Sunday. Bye, We don´t just visit people. We baptize. So things are going pretty well. I´m loving the mission. Until next time.

Josh Ritter

Time Flies

The best day this week was Sunday. After having an excellent family home evening with a couple we´re teaching. They came to church with their 1 year old kid and they loved it. We walked really far in the morning to a little village on the outside of the city Rio Pardo and were able to get one of investigators to go to church. He even gave us a ride to the church. For the sacrament meetings I´ve been playing piano and I´m getting a lot more acostumed to playing now. It´s actually pretty fun. After lunch we were able to go teach people with a member who served a mission 10 years ago in São Paulo.                                                    The first people we visited were the family of the lady we had encountered 2 weeks ago who accepted a baptismal date on our first visit.  This time she had her husband and 12 year old daughter with her to hear our message. The lady told her husband that we converted her to the mormon church and that this church is better than any other church. She said that she was a lost sheep and has been saved and she wants for her husband and daughter also to be saved. She began telling her husband all the reasons why he needs to be baptized in our church. She then ordered my companion and I to explain the message to her husband and have a serious conversation with him. Perfect! I can do that. So we shared a (chique) Plan of Salvation lesson and they all accepted to be baptized and go to church with us Sunday.                                                                                           The 2nd visit was with a mother and her 2 daughters. One of her daughters is about 20 years old and has a 6 year old child. Her other daughter has a boyfriend. The mother is divorced. They told us that they´ve tried so many different religions and feel completely lost because nothing seems to work. When we visited them for the first time a week ago they said that they didn´t have enough faith to prepare to be baptized. I explained to them that God only expects us to a have a little faith. We just a little faith we can make miracles happen. They were conforted to hear this. They then accepted to pray and ask god if they should be baptized in our church. We visited them yesterday and they told us that they prayed and knew that they should be baptized in our church. They felt a great peace. We explained the message of the restoration and the book of mormon with them. They accepted to read the book of mormon and be baptized!                          Then we went to our 3rd visit. We visited a on old couple of about 50 years old. The husband had stopped us on the road 2 weeks ago. He´s a gardener so he was riding on his bike with all his gardening supplies. He told us that 4 years ago sisters from our church visited him and his wife but after they left no one visited them. He asked for us to visit them because they needed it. Yesterday was the first visit we were able to have with the husband and wife. The man told us that they were taught for a long time by the sisters and want to be baptized. They just didn´t know for sure if they were ready. We explained the importance of faith and repentance in their preparation. I promised them blessings and challenged them to be baptized march 26th. They accepted!                                        The mission is great and has been going by fast. I know that God has people prepared for me to teach the need the help the gospels offers.

Carnival and Miracles

Sorry that I wasn´t able to write last week. For 4 days here in Brazil there was the holiday carnival. It´s horrible. It lasted Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights. Every night starting at 9:00 tons of people gathered together in the middle of the city Rio Pardo to party. They play loud music and party until the sun rises the next day. During the day most of the stores were closed because everyone was sleeping. We live in an apartment in the center of Rio Pardo so many times it was hard to sleep because of the loud music playing outiside. I´m glad it´s over. This week me and my companion worked like crazy to reach the standard of excellence. We have to do 45 lessons to meet the goal, 5 being with less actives or recent converts. We were able to teach 38 lessons with investigators, and 7 lessons with less actives. It sure felt good to get home tired at the end of the week. Yesterday I prayed that we might have the opportunities to teach and reach our goal. As we were in a poor neighborhood called Pinheiros I decided to clap hands at a house I felt good about. No one was home so I went to the other side of the road where a family was sitting down in chairs outside their house.(I don´t know English anymore). So I asked them if their could here our message, No. But then a lady came out of the area of the house onto the street and I talked to her. My companion then asked her if we could share a message with her. She said, "Yes! I love the mormon church." She led us to her house on the other side of the street. It was the same house I knocked before that had no one home. We sat outside and talked with her. Let me add a note here about Brazil: Brazil is awesome! I get to walk around in favelas, poor neighborhoods with dirt roads and tons of fields and forests. It´s beautiful. I can talk with anyone I want because the people here are so open. Everyone is friends. Everything is calm and without problems. The people here love to sit down outside their houses and talk. So we sat down with this lady and talked to her. She told a little of her story. I think she has about 60 years of age. She was married to a man who she helped raise when he was a boy. He asked her to marry him even though she was 10 years older than him. She accepted. They were married for 26 years. She raised 21 kids.(Yeah that´s not a typo. She raised 21 kids. Crazy) 2 years ago her husband cheated on her and left to another city and stayed with another lady. It was a sad story to here. She´s been praying to God that she could know how to follow Christ more in her life. She has a huge passion for the things of God but didn´t know how she could follow. She had already went to many different churches but nothing ever worked. She told us that she wants a restoration in her life. She wants an opportunity to leave the past behind and have a new start. Perfect! I got so excited. I gave the message of the restoration the best way I knew how. My companion and I divided the parts perfectly and I used scriptures I had memorized from the Bible. During the lesson this lady began to cry. She said she was so happy to see us young men teaching her. She felt that we were part of her family. She told us that she will go to church with us Sunday and that she wants to be baptized. I then asked if she would prepare to be baptized on March 12th. Without delay she accepted. I extended my hand to congratulate her. With a firm grip she grabbed my hand. At this point her eyes were feeled with tears. She looked me directly in the eyes and said, " You came from so long! You came all the way here to rescue me! Thank you!" I said yes. I felt the spirit strong. I felt so happy to be able to help a daughter of God to come back to Him. I´m so excited to help this lady get ready to be baptized. She will add a great to this branch in Rio Pardo where I´m serving. I love the mission. I love the gospel. Do what´s right, and never give up. You have people waiting who need your help. 

I´m training!

Many things changed for me this week. I received a call from the President of the mission telling me that I would be transfered to a new area and training a new missionary. Tuesday I went with all the other trainers to a hotel in Porto Alegre. There were about 25 new missionaries who arrived at this hotel. They all looked super excited. The assisstants said that all of them were singing hymns during the trip from the airport to the hotel. After the new missionaries left their things in their rooms in the hotel we all left to eat a nice restaurant with the president. We spent the rest of the day listening to different trainings from the president. Towards the end there was a huge presentation showing which area that every missionary would be going to. My new area is Rio Pardo. It´s a little city called Rio Pardo. It´s part of the zone Santa Cruz. The missionary that I´m training is Elder Oliveira. He´s from Terezina, a city in the northern part of Brazil. His accent is very different from the brazilians that live here in the south. That night the new missionaries and sister trainers sleeped in the hotel while the elder trainers slept in the assisstants´ house close to the mission office. The next day we had more trainings, ate lunch with the president again, and then left to our areas. The bus took about 2 hours to arrive in Rio Pardo. On the trip to this city I looked at the cell phone of the area the assisstants had given me and tried to find if there was someone I could call that could show us where our house is and help us with our baggage. I decided to call a member called Jean. He told me that he didn´t have a car and is only 14 years old, but that he could help us get to our apartment on foot. He met us at the bus station and helped us get to our apartment. By the time we got there I was drenched in sweat because I was wearing a suit and it´s summer here in brazil. The apartment was a pig stye so we spent the rest of the night and the next morning cleaning the apartment. We began working and found tons of people to teach. We´re going to baptize like crazy here. All the people here are very receptive and want to hear our message. They are all very friendly. It feels great to have the opportunity to train a new missionary. It won´t be easy because he´s already wanting to go back home. But I won´t let him. I know that this is the best work in the world.

new beginnings

I received a call from the mission president yesterday telling me that I´m being transfered to a new area where I´ll be training a new missionary! This is going to be awesome! I would like to share about an amazing couple that we started teaching. On christmas day there´s hardly anyone on the streets to teach, but we ran into a group of three people on the road and decided to teach them. We were giving out Liahonas to every one we encountered as a christmas present. So we gave a liahona these three people and found out one of them was a member, and the other was his son, but hadn´t been baptized. We did a pray and taught the first lesson on the road, and marked a day to visit the son and his wife another day. It was a fantastic lesson. We watched meet the mormons with them. We then came back again to teach them the plan of salvation with a member who accompanied us. The husband said that after we gave him the book of mormon he had a dream telling him that he needed to read this book. He then read the part in the book of mormon we had left for him and really liked it. They accepted to be baptized and are preparing to be legally married. They were so happy to hear the message of the plan of salvation. They said that everything we taught made sense and they had never heard a message like that before. They also thanked us a lot for entering into their house to share messages of God. I know that missionary work is a very happy and joyful work. Those who follow god´s will, will find the greatest peace that exists in this world.

As I was thinking about my personal standards and my goals I thought of a phrase that has helped me and may help anyone who reads it.

 "Have patience because you will never learn everything all at once. The spirit will teach you little by little. Follow his counsel with exactness. A man is not expected to know more than he is capable. Have confidence in yourself and faith in your decisions. Faith is what leads us to our greatest accomplishments in life. Have faith, go, and if you mess up, just get back up again. With the continuous desire to try again, you will never fail."

Life is not easy, but as we pass more challenges it gets better, and we´ll find greater joy in serving others. I know that my savior is Jesus Christ. I know that the Book of Mormon is true. I know that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was established by Jesus Christ and is the only true church on the earth today.