Tô com o povo!

Hello everybody!

This week really flew by looking back, but going through it was slow and painful! We had a lot of appointments fall through, and a lot of wandering and contacts for other areas!

So I´ll just give a rundown.

Tuesday, we had a training at district meeting and we had a pretty good object lesson. We played hot potato with a box that had a task for us to do. Our ZL told us it was a very hard and humiliating task, and that no one else could help whoever ends up with the box do it. So it turns out Elder Nelson ends up with the box. He reaches in and gets the task, which is a box of chocolate that says ´´Eat the chocolate´´. It is a simple, but very effective lesson... how often do we discourage ourselves with something that has such a great reward? It applies in just about anything that has to do with service (and missionary work)! Afterwards, we went out and worked with Franklin (a member/returned missionary who is new to the ward). We walked plenty and we didn´t have success in finding many people in their houses. At night, we taught Lúcia and Julianna about the Book of Mormon. Lúcia seemed very interested in all the implications about God that the Book of Mormon brought (I think mainly about prophets and that God never changes...more on that thought later), She was also very touched by the promises of answers to prayers given in the Book of Mormon.

Wednesday, we walked the whooooooole day and nothing happened for us. We went and did a family night with a counselor of the bishopric, and his brother-in-law (less active) and a friend of his.

Thursday was a pretty good day. We were walking and came across a group of people in front of their house. We stopped to do the contact and met some wonderful people. They have already known the church and some members, but it seems that the missionaries never passed by to teach them. What we found was someone with practically has our same values. We gave a message from the Book of Mormon (which he accepted gladly). I am certain he will become a part of the church, whether I see it or not.

Friday, we had just about the same luck...At night... we just decided to go to the OTHER end of our area just to do contacts. There wasn´t anything marvelous that happened, but I think the journey was what we needed to experience.

I´m just going to skip to Sunday because I´m getting bored of saying the same thing over and over again haha. So in church, Elder Nelson and I gave talks. I gave mine about how faith is all about action. I used James 2:17,19-20. What I took out of it was that the only thing that differentiates us from our fallen brothers, is that we chose to follow Christ in the first place. And if we stop doing that here? Even they believe in Christ, but if we don´t anything, we won´t be any better off than them... well, we will, but we won´t be happy! I finished with Moroni 7:47 and I finished by saying that ´´If you have faith, you have hope... and if you have hope... you won´t wait.´´ (quick Portuguese lesson... hope is esperança and wait is esperar... see the similarity?).

Another thing I learned this week... while studying preach my gospel, I learned that our message is just saying that God was and is the same. Imagine... if God changed his mind, would the Bible still be valid? D we still have to be perfect? Do we still have to be baptised? If God changes... how are we to know what he wants of us? Either way, there is a need of prophets. The Book of Mormon gives a certain that God doesn´t change what he wants from us... and states exactly what he wants from us. if someone chooses not to accept the Book of Mormon, they don´t understand our Heavenly Father in the least. Another story... in Baturité, there was an influential priest who said the following... ´´There exist two gods. The god of the catholics and the god of the evangelicals.´´ When I stopped and thought about it... it really is true that there are multiple gods. The God that our church knows to be the true God is one who still speaks with his CHILDREN and who never changes, is just and loves us more than imaginable. Other Churches follow a god that doesn´t do miracles, that only created us, that doesn´t really exist, a god that changes... a god that truly doesn´t love us.

All of our investigators NEED to understand that God is our Heavenly Father, and when they truly understand that, they will know that he hasn´t ceased to work among us, to call prophets, or to reveal his secrets to us. How grateful I am to believe in Our Heavenly Father!

So, that was my week, and my insights!

Love you all!

Elder Cornwell

Pizza Sandwich!

So this week flew by again as well!

So there weren´t a whole ton of highlights this week either, so I´ll give a run-down.

Tuesday after District Meeting, I worked in our area with Elder Sampaio and we pretty much just did contacts the whole day just to have new people to teach. We walked up and down the area a ton and my legs were way tired afterwards!

Wednesday, pretty much all of our appointments fell through... Thursday as well, but we managed to visit a less-active and teach a friend of hers as well.

Friday was the day I went over-the-hill, but we didn´t really do anything special to celebrate. It was Independence Day, and so everybody was gone. After wandering around for a ton, we went to Leonardo Brasil´s house, and he gave us lasagna and we marked a day to visit less active young men.

Saturday, we had lunch at home, so we went to the supermarket and got things to make pizzas. We ended up putting sausage and bacon on one pizza, and then putting the other pizza on top, and then cooking it. It was REALLY good, and I could only eat a small piece of it. The rest of the day was full of appointments, but only until about 6:30 we managed to teach. We taught Juliana (the friend of the less active) and her mom, and a friend of her´s as well. After that, we went to the young men´s first counselor, and waited for Leonardo, and we ended up talking a bunch about the mission.

Sunday, we went to wake up Juliana, her mom and her friend Larisa, but it seems the enjoyed the holidays the night before. At church, I gave the lesson in Gospel Principles, which was about Improving our Talents. There are six steps to improve our weaknesses:

1. Recognize our weakness. 

2. Be willing to work to change. 

3. Have faith that the Lord will help you. 

4. Learn and adapt about your talent. 5. 

Practice using your talent, and finally... 

6. Use your talent!

Doing these six things, we will ´´Humble ourselves to the Lord, and he will make our weaknesses strengths.´´ Ether 12:37. In that, I recognized that our weaknesses aren´t weaknesses or anything that prohibits us. It is only a strength of ours that we haven´t learned to us yet!

In Priesthood, we talked about faith. I thought about something an investigator, very catholic, said about our church. She asked why we had so many rules, when the Catholic Church leaves people at will. She also claimed that the people at her church have more faith than most other church-goers. I didn´t have an excellent answer at the time, but on Sunday, the perfect answer came. Someone commented that faith is a principle of action (James 2:something){Allison's note: James 2:14-18}. The matter of fact is, if we have faith, we will change something in our lives, do something with our faith. The proof of the truthfulness of a church is in its members (David A Bednar had a great conference talk about this in the priesthood session, talking about how his father said that the priesthood men in our church should act in a different way if they truly have God´s authority). If a church teaches charity, its members shouldn´t talk bad of other member´s. If a church teaches reverence, its members should not be going to parties the night before church. If a church teaches obedience to the Lord´s commandments, its member´s shouldn´t live in the way the world teaches. In this way, our church truly leaves people ´at will´ in that its members know the blessings of righteous living, and are at will to do it. Not because of Doctor´s orders, not because of work, and not because of parents, but because they know it’s right!

In sacrament meeting, I also learned more new things. A young sister told about how the Lord prepared her to go on a mission. She wasn´t able to hold on to any kind of work, and the Lord spoke to her clearly to go on a mission, but she didn´t have anything to do such. She still put in her papers and went forward with it. The sister´s in her ward did an early farewell party for her, where she received a large amount of clothing to be used on the mission. She didn´t have suitcases, but a new elder was transferred, and he had an extra suitcase that he gave to her. In simple things like that, she was completely prepared for her mission. She related the dream of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel. A rock hewn without hands came forth, or in other words, the lord called a 14 year old boy, unlearned in the ways of the world as his prophet. That rock came to fill up the earth, just as the church is filling the world. The Lord will always provide a way for his work to continue. We can help, or we can hinder, but it will always progress.

Elder Cornwell

A fast, slow week!

So this week pretty much flew by. We´re still having the normal difficulties opening an area from nothing, but we are pretty much going to reverse that this week.

So I´ll just go for the hilights of the week.

Monday night, we had a Stake Missionary Work Meeting with the Stake President. I got some pretty good ideas from the meeting of how to help this area. One bit of advice from the Stake President really applied well. He said that we shouldn´t ask members to be involved in the work, but just involve them. Do little things until they are helping in your work! On Sunday, we had a chance to put that in practice. We had lunch with a member, whose sister is less-active, and a friend of this sister came for lunch as well. Elder Nelson left a message from the Book of Mormon, and then I asked the friend, Nadja, if she had ever had a chance to get to know the church, which she hadn´t. I told her I would lend her a copy of the BoM for a week, and on Saturday, we would come to get it back (buahahaha). Instead of getting her address, we asked if the two sisters could show us where she lives, or even talk about it there. With them knowing, they became a part of our work! It is really difficult to motivate members to ´do our work´ for us, so we just have to be smart about it. 

The whole meeting was about involving the members in our work (I wonder why?), including doing integration activities more to animate the members into doing the work. The other big thing he said was to ´think big´. He said small goals only bring small results. Huge goals may not be met, but they bring better results. I remembered the last food drive between Richland and Hanford, where our goal wasn´t to beat the poundage per person, but to beat Richland straight up. So we got even more motivated, and had HUGE results. Imagine if the goal had been ´´Hey, let’s get half the food that Richland gets!´´. The results would have been way different! It all has to do with motivation and what you are willing to work for. If you work for 5 baptisms in a month, you will only get 5 that month.... if you work for 20, you may not get 20, but you will definitely get more than 5! I guess this has become a theme within the church, that we need to do the MOST possible. In our callings, in our study, and in everything we can!

Thursday, we had Zone Conference, which was also awesome (two awesome meetings in one week... whoo!). President Souza defined what we were working towards in ´Real Growth´ which is Faith in Christ, Establishment of the Church and Strengthening Families. There are many ways to do that, but here in Fortaleza, the best way for all of those is teaching with the goal of making a covenant with Christ in Baptism. There is no better way to build faith in Christ, establish the church, our strengthen a family than to live the restored gospel! Sometimes, we have to remind people of that, as well as unite a family in the church, and that is why work with less actives is so important as well. Anything to have more people at church partaking the sacrament is working towards this goal as real growth.

An example of strengthening families that we will try to do this week is with a new convert family. All of the family minus the oldest son are baptised. The only problem is that the son of 15 is baptised in another ward and isn´t going to church with his family, but later in the day. EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT IS COMPLETELY, TOTALLY, WRONG! He is a great young man who really wants to help, but he thinks he has to go to that ward. So we are going to work with him to transfer his records to our ward (where he can do a lot more good). The oldest son, we are going to make a friendship and teach him what his family already learned. That is plan of how to put ´Real Growth´into this family.

In all reality, not a lot happened this week, but we learned plenty of stuff, so it was still pretty good. But that was my week!

Love you all!

Elder Cornwell

A Nova Semana!

Hello again!

So this week went by really fast! We had almost nothing to do, but at the same time, a LOT to do.

So my area is pretty much the center of Fortaleza, but it’s a pretty affluent area as I have seen here. It is full of a lot of young professionals or college students. But I haven´t seen so many people so young with a car, computer, internet, and a tablet (all of these things are VERY expensive here, especially for someone who has 30 years). In the ward, the Bishop is fairly young, but he is a Civil Engineer who works with something about durability of materials, the first councilor is a professor of Biophysics at the Federal University of Ceará and I have no idea what the secretary does, I just know he has an iPhone. But just to get an idea of the area, it goes north/south from the Ceará Jockey Club to the Airport, and east west is Av. Tenente Moacir Matos and something Lopez. It’s a fairly small area, but there is plenty of people here.

More about Elder Nelson... he reminds me a lot of Taft (Elder Anderson... whoa! they both have apostle names!). He was studying at BYU-I and got his call for March (he laughs about that now) and his trainer is now the finance secretary of the mission.

So this week didn´t really have a whole ton that happened, but I´ll go over what our ideas were for the week.

Early on I noted that the missionaries that were here before weren´t that connected with the members or the leadership of the ward, so the first thing we did was to start that relationship. We went to the bishop as soon as we could, and got addresses of people who would be important in our work. We also talked about what the ward was needing most, which he said was éxcitedness´ on the part of the members´. Afterwards, we went and got to know the Ward Mission Leader and we got working with him right away and got him as involved as possible (asking members to pass certain things through him so he would be an important part). Then we talked to the relief society president to find some less-active sisters who are in need of visits, or strengthening. We also started to visit less-actives that are very close to returning to activity, or leaving activity. 

We got to know a Brother here, the young men´s president, who is actually a professional athlete. He is in rest after a knee surgery, but he is a middle fielder, as well a futsal player (he played for the national futsal team of Brasil). So we hit it off pretty well right quick, and he offered himself as a help for us, since he knows a LOT of people. He is a really cool guy, he even put Soccer on hold to serve a mission in São Paulo.

The rest of the week, we went by visiting these members as well as trying to build up a teaching group. We left a lot of short messages with members and we asked for a lot of water. On Friday night, someone repaid a favor that Mom and Dad did. We were walking to visit a member near the end of our area, and two people shout ´Elders!´. We see an older woman and her daughter and they asked if we were new/lost to which we replied yes. We talked a little bit and found out they are from the ward over, and they asked us if they could buy us dinner (less asked and more just took us to a pizzaria and bought us a pizza). The whole time I was thinking of Mom and Dad feeding the Elders in Costco haha.

Sunday, we started with Church at 8:30 with Priesthood. The Elder´s Quorum President, Tagino gave a lesson on Bishop Edgely´s(?) conference talk on ´real Growth´. He gave an example of someone who makes R$20k per month. He makes a good deal of money, right? Well in the course of that month, he spends a good deal of money on meaningless things, and he ends up with $4k each month that he actually keeps. He starts working Saturdays as well, adding another $5k, but he only gains $5k per month. Is what he is doing real growth? Is he REALLY gaining $25k per month? Then he asked what this man could do to save more of this money. Some of the answers were...

Reorganize his system

Evaluate what is happening to his money

Taking care of his money

Then, he applied all of these things to the new members of the church. Many are being baptized, but few are actually staying active, so we need to get organized to maximize the number of people who stay active. At night, the bishop gave a message to open Ward Counsel about the parable of the talents. I thought of it as the ward is given so many baptisms, and it is up to them what they do with it. They can deal wisely, or poorly, and as a result, the number of baptisms afterwards will be affected.

So that was my week... it went by pretty fast, but that’s what happens!

That´s all for today!

Elder Cornwell

Easiest Transfer, Ever!

Hello everybody! So this week will probably be a quick recap of the happenings and going-ons.

Monday was the normal P-day routine, and I can´t really remember much of what we did, except that we went up to the Jesuitas again and walked around in the ´jungle´. At night we set a baptismal date for João and afterwards we passed by Herlanie.

Tuesday, we had our normal District meeting and then headed home, and we passed by Radsom (co-worker of João and John) as well as Deivid. WE were going to go to visit Patricia, but the Federal Police are cleaning out a neighborhood and all the traffickers, and we were advised to stay away for a while.

Wednesday, our lunch was earlier on in the day, so we headed out and talked with John and João again and made sure everything was going well. In the afternoon we talked again with Herlanie, Andrea and Rayanne and told them that if they wanted to know who would be leaving, they had to go to church on Sunday, and they had no other way of finding out! hahaha. At night, we ate pizza with João so he wouldn´t be alone at night (The Devil knows how to work well... good thing we do too!). A few friends of his stopped by to talk to him, and we ended up doing a few contacts and marked appointments for the end of the week.

Thursday, Elder Huntley and Elder Clemens came to do an interview for João, and afterwards we had lunch with Branco and Ancylia. The rest of the day, I can´t even remember what happened!

Friday, we had lunch out in Candeia again with sister Eliza. The trip out there was normal, and then we headed back with Irmã Paula... and as we were going, I heard a ´thump thump thump thump´ sound that I instantly recognized (You see Mom and Dad, I know when I´m driving and the car has a flat!). Anyways, her tire was REALLY flat, so we pulled off to the side to change it, but her spare tire was already wrecked. I told ´´Well, this one is just flat, and this other one is completely shot... so it really won’t get any worse if you drive on the old one´´. So off we went the rest of a km back to town haha. We made sure she was taken care of and headed off on our routine.

Saturday, we didn´t have lunch, so we had lunch early and fast, and we got to work at about 11 in the afternoon. We passed by our investigators, and at 3, we taught some of the references we got from João on that day. They seemed to like the message, but two of them promised they would go to church. Afterwards, we kept on passing by everyone. At about 8, we ran out of things to do, so we headed back home to pack things up (even though we didn´t have any idea who would go and who would stay.

Sunday, I had the faith to finish packing my bags ;) and then we headed off to church. The two girls who said they would come to church came, as well as two high councilors from Fortaleza. For Sunday School, Elder Leal and I gave a lesson using Helaman 6-12 about what happens when we forget about the Lord. It was interesting how it had a clear contrast in those chapters between the Lamanites and the Nefites. Afterwards, we were waiting to go to lunch with President, and we got the call that I would leave (in the middle of a story I was telling the secretary about two farmers.... so two farmers need rain, and they both pray so that there would have rain. Afterwards, one farmer went and prepared his fields for a flash flood, while the other farmer waited for the rain to come. So who really had faith that the Lord would send rain?) When I asked ´who had faith´ the phone rang, and I said ´here comes the rain hahaha´. So afterwards we had lunch, and I said goodbye to very few people, but the Secretary gave me a hug and thanked me for everything I did in Baturité. Afterwards, we headed out with the HC´s to Fortaleza, and we slept at the LZ´s house.

Today, we took a taxi to the Chapel of Estaca Montese, and the whole transfer was announced in front of everybody. Elder Rocha went to Baturité (which I liked a lot... Elder Leal will like him a lot, and he will do a great job there). Luck has it, that I was transferred to exactly where I was sitting! Now I am in Ala Montese with Elder Nelson, from Puyallup. He just finished being trained, and we are both new to the area, so it will be a good challenge!

Well, my time is up. I love you all, and have a great week!

Elder Cornwell