Well this week has been great and strange and lots of things have happened actually.
Firstly,
General Conference was awesome. When Elder Eyring got up there in the first
session, I felt so good. I thought about how I have gained even more testimony
and conversion since last conference. I think every missionary in the world was
just like rooting on Elder Neil Anderson and Elder Oaks. Their talks were
incredible and I know that missionary work is seriously only going to move
forward if the missionaries and members work together. I really hope that the members understood
their message. We are all missionaries at whatever age with whatever amount of
time we have in the Church. Preaching the gospel is so important. Elder Oaks made it so easy giving lots of
ideas of how to get started.
This
week we taught Adailton, the son of Claudineide (recent-convert). He has a
little bit of trouble believing in God. So we decided to focus on helping him
gain faith in God and Jesus Christ. We taught him about faith and then assigned
him to read Alma 32 and to pray to God with real intent. This week when we
passed by, I was trying to prepare for him by finding the stories in the Book
of Mormon about the missionaries who had taught atheists. When we got there, we
asked him about the reading we had assigned and he explained the chapter
beautifully. When we asked him about his
prayer, he looked around for a little bit and said, "I felt something
different. I felt like this huge feeling of alívio (relief). It was something
that I had never felt before in my life. It was amazing." I think my jaw
was on the ground. We were amazed at his response - and incredibly happy.
We
had the opportunity to do a service project this week in an investigator’s
house. It went super well. We got to knock down a bunch of walls. We also
removed a bunch of tile. My hands wouldn't open up afterwards because I was
clinging onto the chisel and hammer so hard haha.
While
we were walking down the road one day, there was a man selling hair shaving
machines. (hair clippers? I forget) We
stopped real quick to look. He thought that my companion wasn't Brazilian
either and thought we didn’t know Portuguese super well, so he starts off
"Buenos dias! Bom dia!" and saying some other stuff in Spanish. Then
he tried to sell us the machine for R$120. But we were like uh no. Then he said
$80 and we were like nah. And then he was like R$60 and we were like no we don’t
even have 60. And he was like well how much do you have? Elder Gasparelo said
he had R$40 so he made it 40 for us because we were "good men."
The
worst (and funniest) part of this hair cutting story is that the same night we
wanted to try out our new machine. So my companion started to cut the sides of
my hair with a number 4 clip. However, the battery ran out. So we set it aside
to recharge. While it was recharging, my companion went to talk on the phone to
follow up with the district leaders. I
decided that I would be able to shave the sides off my hair on my own. I started
to do so when my companion starts screaming "No! No! NOooooo!" And I
was like what happened? Then I looked in the mirror to see that I had cut a
hole in my hair...because my companion took of the #4 clip and I didn’t see... so
I passed a number zero on my hair. It
was terrible. hahhahaha So Elder Gasparelo passed a number one on the rest of
it and cut on top with scissors…. I’m pretty sure I am going to shave the rest
of it off today.
I
love you guys. I hope you listen to conference again this week. So many great
things. I know this is the true Church of Jesus Christ
