20 February 2017 Champs and Chumps

Dear family and friends,

I hope you guys liked that last email. My hands were tired afterwards, I know, woe is me, but it was a good week.

I forgot to even mention the announcement when it came, but this last week Elder Ulisses Soares from the presidency of the seventy visited our mission. He visited most of the mission up in Lisbon and then came south to meet with the remaining zones. It was really cool, particularly because he´s Brazilian. He visited the MTC when I was there and spoke to all the missionaries in English, but when he visited with us just this last week he spoke in Portuguese. It´s quite fun hearing the different accents and just understanding and soaking it all up. He gave us a lot of good council, in fact we were sat there for about 4 hours as he taught and answered questions. There was a lot said, but in short it was a spiritual banquet.

I also got to see Elder Cottrell. He´s still a doof.

We got to say hey to Alice this week a couple times, we made a couple appointments with her, but they fell through. Because she was sick these last few weeks she fell behind at work a lot and never finished her store inventory, so had to catch up on all that and also recover from sickness. All that left her really stressed, which always leads to her being nervous etc etc, not forgetting to mention she´s like 70 years old.

But no worries, she needs time I guess. She loves to see us when we pass by her pharmacy and is still reading the BoM. She will surely come to church soon and start progressing. We will fight for this Sunday.

Álvaro is still doing phenomenal. We lost contact with him the entire week, and no, he didn´t make it to church. We met with him on Sunday, without an appointment, with Rui too. He was elated to see us, and had drawn up two more sketches like the last one I showed, both with more details. He is a very smart, interested, and devoted man. He would have gone to church, but he´s basically an "on call" waiter so he was called in for the whole week, 18 hours a day to help out with some sort of VIP group in a hotel and didn´t get time off until Sunday afternoon when we knocked on his door. Rui got to know him better, and we already made plans to introduce the gospel to his wife. He said he will talk with his boss again about Sundays. He´s just plain great. There´s just a list of things that he does that are so great. When we showed up he whipped out his notebook with his sketches and said "alright I made some new ones, but I have a question here..." and so on. He told us, from his knowledge, what he knew about the pre-mortal existence and the war in heaven, and Elder Jan just turned and looked at me with the funniest face that said "how the heck does he remember all this after 10 years." Ah good stuff.

Also, that George Clooney doppleganger, Amadis (ah-mah-DEESH to help out with pronunciation) is doing great. We showed up for our lesson with him with Rui. We taught a modified lesson talking a bit more about the BoM, using 1 Nephi 13. It ran well, and Rui got to know him (they live on the same street too).

Elder Jan and I came back for another appointment with him later this week, and Amadis had forgotten about it, but let us in anyway. He showed us the view of his balcony, and there on the a table and chair was the Book of Mormon, he said he was just about to sit down, relax, and read.

We taught him the Plan of Salvation, and it ran really well. We invited him to be baptized, and he accepted. Good. Now we will be working with him to cover the remaining lessons and commandments, and help him grow a desire to follow all of them, including the Law of Chastity, by getting married. It will be a process, but I think it will run well.

Then he showed up to church yesterday again! He was dressed in a suit and everything, and stayed for all the meetings. He enjoyed it a lot. He payed attention and everything. As we walked from one class to the other, he said "so how do you guys baptize people? Where do you guys go?" Conveniently at our side in the hallway was a painting of Christ´s baptism, and I pointed to it and said "Welp, in the water." I kinda joked a bit, but then explained that a chapel in Faro has a font. But I also said that if he liked he could be baptized in the ocean because he already does kitesurfing and stuff. He said that that could be interesting.

For the priesthood meeting, the teacher put on "Legacy" and we watched it to learn about the pioneers... it was a bit odd if you ask me, but afterwards Amadis said "whats the name of this movie, I like it."

I talked with him afterwards a bit more, and he said that Rui sent him a link to "Meet the Mormons" and that he watched it. I, surprised said "whoa, how was it?" and he explained that he liked it a lot, the perspectives of different lives. He´s just darn cool. We´ll be teaching him more this week, and he said he´s already planning to come next week, which will be district conference (the equivalent of stake conference).

Richard, our new friend from Columbia.. well the news is he´s doing well. Rui is our bridge of contact. Rui tried to bring him to church but Richard was tired or something like that... a bit disappointing, but no worries. We´ll be meeting with Rui and Richard this week to talk more.

Also, Mónica gave us a call, and asked for an apology. She was sorry for having failed with appointments and asked us to wait until March to try to meet up again. I obliged to her request, reluctantly, but made her give me her word that we would visit in March. She agreed. But it´s realistic, maybe... She´s busy doing a move and stuff... but man, excuses. Nah, all is well, we´ll meet up with her eventually.

We also found some new folks to teach this week. Knocking on doors a couple weeks back, we found an African family, Barbosa (from Guiné Bisau), Estmeralda (from Angola), and their 2 year old son, Rafael. We finally got to meed up with them yesterday.

We taught the restoration to them and it ran really well. I won´t go into a ton of detail, but Barbosa, without being asked, said "I felt something with you guys today, something touched my heart" — well shoot, that´s what´s supposed to happen. It ran great, they accepted the BoM and the invite to read and pray.

But, their not married... this is like the 7th time in my mission I´ve found a couple really cool but discovered they´re not married... Oh well, another process, but they are still important.

In other news, we were invited to eat with the Finnish couple again. They are great, they even gave us a couple references. They made what I think was meatloaf, it had carrots and broccoli inside, and was dang good.

Also, Jorge (Jorge 1) one of the Ecuadorean members has a really good friend in his neighborhood, also named Jorge (Jorge 2). Jorge 1 invited Jorge 2 over for dinner, and invited us all as well. Jorge 2 said there wasn´t enough room in Jorge 1´s house, so Jorge 2 invited Jorge 1 and Jorge 1´s family to come to Jorge 2´s house to have dinner with Jorge 2´s family. Jorge 2 also wanted the missionaries over at Jorge 2´s place because Jorge 1 always said that the missionaries are cool, even though Jorge 2 doesn't believe in God. It was a feast and we shared a good message with them. Jorge and Jorge both liked it, and Jorge and Jorge were both really funny during the visit, their both large men who love to joke around. It was a good time, and honestly, a really simple example of member missionary work. X member has a friend, so he invites his friend over for dinner, and invites the Missionaries too! It´s simple, and let me tell you, it´s a lot better than us just knocking on their door.

We ate this soup that was just carcass and rice. I say carcass because they literally killed a number of chickens that morning to use to cook, and they used all of the chickens. The neck, the liver, the heart, even the feet. I dished myself some, and saw a chicken foot on my plate and just thought "um I´m not gonna deal with that" and I ended up putting it on Elder Tester´s plate. (all 4 of us went, we were ordered to come in larger numbers due to quantity of food). I think I at a liver, and a piece of a heart, I dunno. But hey, it was good.

We talked about James 1:5 and invited them to pray. They were seriously joking around a lot that night, but when we shared the message things suddenly went calm, and they payed attention. It was good.

Also, Emanuela is doing well! She went to Lisbon this week for a doctor´s appointment, but gave her a call the moment she arrived home, and ended up stopping by to say hello. She couldn´t get her daughter to read Gospel Principles to her, so she ended up reading 3 pages on her own. She said she enjoyed it a lot and that a lot of memory is coming back. She said it was a struggle to read too (no vision in left eye, etc) but she still pushed through and read. She said she would read more too. She wants to re-learn everything with us.

Trouble is, she´s a very timid woman. She unfortunately said she will wait for next week to come to church, we tried to convince her and help her have desire to go, but declined... with time. She has gone through a lot in her life, so we want to take it easy with her I guess.

I dunno if I mentioned this in the last email, so maybe I´ll say it again. She lost a lot of memory, right? She said when she saw us in the peep hole the day we knocked on her door she didn´t want to open up. She thought we were salesmen. However, she said the moment she saw our little black nametags she suddenly remembered the missionaries and how she liked them back in Brasil... and like so, she opened. Pretty cool.

But yeah, that sums it up I think. Lots of cool stuff happening, it´s always a pleasure being an instument in the hands of the Lord. This week has been fun, lots of good experiences. I´m doing well. Enjoy the email, hope all is well with everybody.

Ciao,

Elder Ward