Dear
family and friends,
Yet another week that ran surprisingly well! I think I´m just
going to throw down a general update of what´s been going on.
You´re probably wondering about that Ângela who was super
interested in family histrory. Well, she showed up for the lesson we had
planned on Tuesday, but that other member, Ana, couldn´t make it unfortunately.
So, we picked up the situation with what we had. We sat down with Ângela and we
taught the Plan of Salvation with temples, family history, and proxy work.
After all that, she said (no, you´ve got to picture a small old woman with no
teeth) "oh, that´s so nice". We invited her to be baptized by authority
and so on, and she accepted to be baptized on December 16th. She quickly asked
"what time will be the baptism?" We planned for 11am. It was a really
good lesson. We planned to meet up again in the chapel thursday morning.
To our dismay, Ângela didn´t show up. She had told us from memory
when we were to meet up again, and she had already shown us that she wasn´t the
forgetful type, even if whe was, we wrote it on a little paper for her to
remember. As I mentioned in the last email, she doesn´t have a working phone
nor a steady home address for now, so we had no option but to depend on simple
appointments. So, long story short, we lost contact with her, which is a huge
bummer. She didn´t come to our activity on saturday (i´ll explain below), nor
to church on sunday... All we can do now is hope to run into her again. We know
what street she lives on, so if we get desperate we can knock all the apartment
buildings there looking for her haha, but there are quite a few.
We had a district meeting on Tuesday, and I planned to do it in
the neighboring area´s chapel. We walked a good distance there, and had a great
meeting. We had previously planned to meet up with Fernando on that side of
town anyways, so right as the meeting ended, Fernando walked in and got to meet
some more missionaries! He liked it, and even took our photo (see below). After
that, we sat down with him to have another lesson. Unfortunately Fernando still
hasn´t read the Book of Mormon on his own. We decided to read with him, so we read
3 Nefi 27. He is hesitant because he wants to straighten out his life
(work-wise) before being baptized, and for such reasons is hesitant to do even
the basic things. We talked about he Gift of the Holy Ghost and how it can help
him to get things like that worked out with God´s help and guidance. Fernando
understood, but we´ll just have to keep hoping he does his part. He seems to
like us missionaries more than our message, so we´re keeping an eye on his real
progress.
Unfortunately our appointments with Fernando during the rest of
the week fell through. He didn´t make it to our activity nor to church...
bummer. He´s getting slippery again.
However, Paulo, our friend from Moçambique and Fernando´s buddy
came to church, and brought his ex-wife (Paula, funny enough) and son too! Huh?
Finally, after knowing Paulo for about 2 months he made it to church. It was a
fast and testimony meeting, and for some reason Paulo had the guts to go up and
bear his "testimony". I think he didn´t really know what to say nor
how to say it, but he shared a few words about his faith in God, gratitude,
repentance and such, so in the end it wasn´t a huge nail-biter. At least all of
our members know him now!
We talked with Paulo after church and invited him to be baptized
next Sunday after church. He accepted and really wants to, but we´ll be keeping
a close eye on him.
A sidenote, Paula actually showed up at the church a couple weeks
back on a weekday and asked to talk to us. We showed up and had a chat with her.
She kinda needed to just talk to someone, I think, and she told us a lot about
her and Paulo, motives for divorce, etc, I won´t go into details. However, she
asked "Paulo was baptized, right?"
A small, but long pause "Umm, no..."
Paula was surprised and a bit frustrated too. We talked it out,
and we came to the conclusion that Paulo is trying to fix his life a bit, and
in short terms his mouth is running a bit faster than his legs. Aka he´s trying
to change, he says that he´s changed, but hasn´t changed yet. So, we´re going
to try to help Paulo, but we hope to discover his true motives. We have a
lesson planned with him tonight.
We´re still working with Welton bit by bit. We actually managed to sit
down and teach a lesson this week, so that was good, it´s just that he was so
tired that he nearly started to nod off during the lesson. We really want to
get him to church and especially activities now so that way he can meet the
members more but something goes wrong each time... We´ll still try.
Remember Zé? Well, he gave us a call about a half-hour before a
marked appointment with him and in a sad tone explained that he had had a fight
with his wife the night before. His wife had talked with her religious leader,
and such religious leader talked a ton of trash about us, and Zé´s wife took it
all in. She got home and basically threatened divorce if Zé continued, so Zé
called to let us know that he couldn´t meet with us anymore. I talked it over a
bit more with him on the phone, but I accepted the fact that the situation just
isn´t going to be good if we continued with him, even if it was sneakily. I
told Zé to never forget what he had felt and learned with us, and he promised
not to. He said he´ll keep the Book of Mormon and the memories well.
We were knocking doors and we found this guy named Marco, 17, a
really cool kid. We gave a brief explanation of the BoM and the Restoration to
him and he was genuinely interested to hear more. He said that he couldn´t let
us in in that moment because of his grandma, but we marked to meet up with him
another day. On such day, we called, no answer. We sent a message, and he
replied a while later saying that his parents wouldn´t allow him to learn about
another religion... gosh.
And those are just 2 examples, oh, I could write a long list of
people who cut us off like that... I don´t mind when someone rejects us, but I
do mind when someone rejects us in place of someone else...
Sorry for the rant! I´m not super annoyed nor put down, it´s just
how it is. We´ll find people to fill their places.
So, the activity. A couple weeks back we decided to try putting
together an activity for our ward. Our ward basically never has activities.
It´s a bit silly.
With our ward misson leader, Franklin (a brazilian) we planned it
out, bit by bit. But our ward mission leader is a really busy guy so in the end
it was basically just us 4 missionaries putting everything together. We wanted
to try and designate some members to certain tasks, but due to past experiences
here in the ward we decided that we would try it out solo to see how many
people we can get there. In all, this activity was a test run to see how many
members would show up, but most importantly, how many non-members would show
up.
After a lot of work, we had our Christmas-themed open house
activity night on Saturday, and surprisingly we had a decent turnout of about
25 members. Two weeks before the activity we announced the activity and gave
each member a few pass-along cards made specifically for our open house and we
invited everyone to bring someone. In the end, not a single non-member came...
dang it. Ok, to be fair, our investigators that we invited had complications,
but we at least hoped that the entire ward that was invited could bring a few
people, but nope haha.
The only extra turnout we had was 15min after the activity had
ended. One of our investigators, Artur came, and an ex-communicated member
that we´ve been working with invited a good friend of his who also showed up
just afterwards.
As negatively as I may portray it, it wasn´t a complete loss!
Those two non-members that came integrated a bit. It was really fun and it got
the members (who went) really excited. They are certainly more open to the idea
of activities now. We´ll start planning and designating work for the next one
soon.
I
guess that´s it. We´re doing good. We´ve found quite a bit of new people with
some potential. I´m out of time for now. Until next week!
Paz,
Elder
Ward
Our activity
Our district
Pday
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