25 December 2017 Natal Diferente

Dear friends and family,

Merry christmas!

Let´s cut to the chase... this week ran well and he had some good experiences... I was sick with a cold all week but we still worked a ton... and now I´m down with a pretty brutal stomach flu but it´s christmas so I gotta talk to my family!

Because I´ll be talking to my family I´m going to keep this one shorter...

This week´s sunday was christmas eve, as you all know, so it messed up a lot of our plans to bring investigators to church. Not only this, but our bishop said that we wouldn´t even have sunday meeting in our own chapel in our area. The sacrament meeting for our ward was moved to the neighboring area... so we had to try to bring people to church in a chapel outside our area... but things still worked out.

But we worked things out. Ângela was confirmed, someone gave her a ride. It was a good experience for her and a big relief too. An unconfirmed investigator is like a big looming debt.

Paulo came to church once again, and one of his good friends was baptized in the other area this weekend and he got to see the confirmation, which was good. We´re talking with Paulo about the priesthood now. He´s going well.

We got some referals from a good family in the neighboring ward and we went and taught them. Theyre a brazilian family and have already shown some good progress. Wilton, Raquel (grandparents), Kely, and Rodrigo (a young married couple). Only Rodrigo and Kely came to church with us, it was a good time, they made some friends. They raised their eyebrows quite a bit when we explained the restoration and eternal marraige. We talked about baptism and everything. Theyre reading and praying about the BoM. They enjoyed their visit to church.

My new companion, Elder Baird (Bear-d) is a good guy. He´s from spanish fork utah, threw javelin in highschool, and got 4th place in the state of utah in a welding competition. He´s a good kid, he´s obedient to mission rules which is already a huge leap forward.

Unfortunately Elder Baird is having a lot of trouble with the language. I´m not allowed to speak with him in English, nor do I want to. So, we don´t know each other very well because communication between us is awfully difficult. I help him out sometimes... I give him the word that he´s lacking or I translate a word or two, but unfortunately it´s not sticking in his mind. I give him the translation of a word "tão means so" but ten minutes later he forgets... I´m working with him, it´s certainly testing my patience! One day I said a sentence that took 30 minutes to explain... I said "If the mission wasn´t so close to it´s goal this month, I´d be in bed" (because the mission has a goal of 75 baptisms in a month and we´re super close this month so everyone´s working like crazy, and I was sick...)

I dont blame him. Portuguese is tough and I´m also not taking it very easy on him... maybe I should haha. He doesn´t have experience with latin language.

Im not trying to complain, it´s the situation. The first week is always like this. Don´t worry, I´m not going to kill him, I just like to push him. His first day he did a street contact and did well. Our goal now is to help him understand the doctrine of each lesson so that he can participate in the lessons that we teach.

Im pretty worn out now... Im going to wrap it up.

Feliz natal,

Elder Ward