Um Missionário no Brasil: Conferência!

Hello everybody! So another super quick week, with much less interruptions than normal, which went well for us!

Tuesday, we did our weekly planning to try some new things with the ward to see if we could get things to jump start here. So we started off talking with the bishops asking them for two kinds of references... actually three. New investigators, less actives and members who have lots of potential references! So we started applying the whole ´´Ask everyone for a reference´´ thing, since contacts are a lot easier to do when you are looking for a friend or neighbor. But during the afternoon, we went and talked to Michele and Ribamar again, and Michele discovered that her mother had taken her Book of Mormon to read, so we gladly gave her a new one so her mother could have one as well.

Wednesday, we had district meeting and I gave the training on revelation through prayer. I talked a lot about our preparation to help our investigators have real intent when praying for a confirmation of our message. We can plan a lot on how and what we will teach to help touch what is really needed by our listeners. We talked with Ribamar and Michele again, as well as Lucas and his brother Rodrigues. We are working with them little by little to get to the point Rodrigues will actually sit down and listen to us. We ran after a bunch of other people, but we didn´t manage to talk to most the references we got.

Thursday we had an awesome experience with our new efforts. We received a reference from a member (Mila) who said she had dreamed about a friend of hers that morning. So she gave us her address and we went there. So we went to Julianna´s house, and she was at the door already, and was very surprised to see us. So, we talked a bit about her life and religious background, and we began to gave a message of the restoration. At the end when we invited her to pray about our message, she told us that she didn´t actually live at that house, but she was feeling really down and felt she should go to her mother´s house, and when she did, we showed up. She had told us earlier that God answers her prayers, many times, through words of other people. We affirmed that what had happened was exactly that, and we were there to help her find joy in the Restored Gospel. Afterwards, we told Mila, and she was so excited, that she gave us another reference to see what could happen.

Friday was less eventful, since we had to go to the Federal Police for Elder Curl to get his ID. Then we hit traffic and we spent maybe 4 hours on the bus going home.

Then Saturday and Sunday, we watched conference and we went after a ton of people to try to let them hear the voice of the prophet! But most people just didn´t seem too interested in something like that. But we did have some very good talks. I actually thought Saturday Afternoon flew very well. Elder Cardon spoke about the way of the Lord and Elder Bednar completed his talk about the Law of Chastity. Those two together made me think that God is kind of like a GPS. We can follow him and His set path, but some people don´t want to be ´limited´ by his path, and would rather go right instead of left. So instead of having an easy and fast path, we many times enter into a street labeled ´Do not Enter´ and BAM, we run into a garbage truck. So we should just follow with faith that the path God has given us is the right one. Even though there may appear obstacles, just trust that it is the way we should go.

So that was my week!

Love Elder Cornwell