November 25, 2013

Oi Família! Another AWESOME week! We baptized 10-year-old Lucas yesterday, and the best part is that everyone in these photos wants to be baptized now too!! We wanted to baptize his whole family, but Marcela and William didn´t want to get married, in fact they were separating. Marcela is the woman in purple. She was just hanging back the whole day and didn´t really say anything as we taught Lucas so we assumed she had no interest. But then our angel, Jaqueline (this is another baptism that lives on her road) talked to her and apparently she does want to get baptized now. And not only that, William moved out three days ago and she actually can!!!! MIRACLES. All those other boys are his neighbors who we contacted the day before and they all want to get baptized, Washington, Gabriel and Lucas. They all call me Tia and Gabriel wants me to teach him piano lessons. I told him I can´t promise anything... do you guys have any ideas of how I could make this a really productive opportunity? I LOVE when kids are the examples. Every week lots of good things happen but so do a lot of bad things. We drop A LOT of investigators because they don´t understand our purpose and won´t change their lives. Lais was the worst this week. She completely denied in front of us and her dad that she had a dream. When we asked if she prayed she said no. I don´t understand her, but we´ve done all we can for her. I hope she gets another chance. We only can offer. Christ wants to know who is willing to follow him and leave everything else behind. Something is always required of ourselves. If you haven´t found it yet, you should try and look again for The Atonement and Missionary Work with Elder Holland and President Eyring. Yesterday was one of the funnest days on the mission. We had lunch with Rodrigo and Èlen, which is the BEST lunch. I feel like I´m in one of the brother´s houses when I´m there, they have that kind of humor and are just a cute young couple. I told Rodrigo if he ate a dog treat, I would. Unfortunately he did, and I had to. I told him I´d write my parents that the members are feeding me dog food here :) Sundays on the mission really are a result of the week you´ve had and how hard you´ve worked. If you didn´t work, you have to run to get all of your numbers in for the day, which is SO hard. Everyone is either at a different church or drinking. But this week we had our goals, had a baptism, so we went back to Elen´s for dinner. I feel like our house is finally fun again, and transfers are coming in just one week! Sister de Paula is so sweet, she´s like a little disney princess. She does this really funny little kid voice that just kills me. She´s also just a really good missionary. I really wanted to work with less actives, but she really has a plan. Yesterday we talked with the bishop about people we can visit and he gave us each a blessing. It was all her idea and she got it from reading about the Zoramites as the inactive members. I want her to come stay at our house and visit Colorado someday! She´s already been to Salt Lake, Las Vegas and both disney parks. I´m still living with Sister Willette and I just showed her that picture. It is a small world! That´s so cool that you went to New York and that the Jefferies are living so close to there! I hope Madison is doing well, all good missionaries have a hard time coming home. Did a tornado happen in New York?? I saw that on the news in someone´s house but haven´t heard anything more about it.. it looks really bad. What part of New York was it? Sister Seal´s companion in the MTC was reassigned to Rochester but just got her visa and is here now. We still make tons of street contacts, but they pretty much all lie about going to church then we start from scratch. Really all of our success is coming from Jaqueline´s street. She honestly does more than we do and I will use her as an example of member missionary work for all other members. It´s incredible. She spends all day talking to our investigators, bringing them to church, calling them, calling us when someone´s home and we can teach them. It´s unbelievable. She doesn´t even know each day if she´ll live another day, and this is how she spends her life. She cries when things go wrong, cries at baptisms, and learns things rapidly about missionary work. This woman was baptized FOUR MONTHS AGO. She really gets it. One thing I´ve really learned this week is how the Lord provides when you do your part. If we just keep doing contacts with our whole heart in the work and without complaining, amazing things happen even if you contact 60 people in a day and none of them go to church. People just come out of the woodwork. We still needed to find 7 new investigators Saturday, and they all just came out of the woodwork after a week of contacting EVERYONE. We recieved a family as a reference, Lucas´friends and one really good street contact whose family we´re going to teach tomorrow. Now that this week ended so well, it´s time to get right back to work. After Jesus Christ suffered in Gethsemany and on the cross, he didn´t take a break. For those three days he did missionary work in the Spirit World, and after he never stopped working the wonderful work of salvation. I love you all so much!! I´m almost certain I´ll get to Skype, but I don´t know how we´ll be able to work out talking at the same time. It would be amazing but I think maybe I get a certain time and then we just keep working like usual. CHRISTMAS!! WOOO! Everyones putting up their pisca-pisca (lights) Keep doing the work of Salvation! Um abração, Sister Moore