Linhares - Week Two

Hey FAM! Well my pday has been switched to Monday, so this is the time when I’ll be emailing you.

This week has been pretty rough. Both me and my companion are new to this area, so we've spent most of our time trying to build our teaching pool. This area is huge too, so we spend a LOT of time walking, and we only are teaching a few lessons a day, which is not good. We should have a baptism this week, our investigator, Cida, should be baptized, and she went to church again, but for some reason she wants to ask her pastor if this is good for her. We tried all we could to tell her that she needs to ask Heavenly Father, and not her pastor, but she's stuck on that anyway. Our other investigator that we've been teaching regularly is being weird about baptism, he recommitted to a day, but we think he's having problems with the law of chastity and he is still drinking coffee. He says he knows that it's true though, which is really disappointing. A few of the others we are teaching are having a lot of trouble actually doing things. We  have one who just refuses to pray. Really sad and frustrating. We met with one family this week, the parents are Roberto and Rosangela, and they have two kids of baptism age. They're a really great family, and would be awesome. We've only visited them twice, but they haven't prayed about the Book of Mormon yet. They have friends in the church too, so we trying to get them to go teach with us this week. We are also trying to start using the members more, have a lot of family home evenings and have the members invite friends so that we can start teaching them. We do a LOT of walking. But I like this city. It's really clean compared to São Paulo, but our area is ridiculously huge. It takes us like 25 minutes to walk to our area from our apartment.

I don't think I have anything else about the actual work, since it's been a short week. We're looking to improve a lot.

Well, it's been really hard for me this first week--a lot of walking, which I’m not used to, haha, and I don't understand people very well, and I can only say most of the things I want to during lessons, some things I still have trouble with. And only one investigator is progressing so that is discouraging too. I hit a low point this week, but I've been reading the scriptures, which has been helping me, and I have some goals this week for me to talk and teach more, rather than my companion, who has been doing most of the teaching (mostly because he just keeps talking and I don't really get a chance to do much.) We re going to be working on that this week, but I think that was also a contributing factor to my discouragement, because I felt like I wasn't helping at all.

This week is going to be awesome. I can just feel it. I just have to use more faith. I can do this, because this is where the Lord wants me to be. I was reading in Mormon 9, and I don't remember what verse right now, but the basic message that I got out of it was that if we are really disciples of Christ, we need to preach the gospel to everyone. I really like that chapter. Ths week will be awesome.

Thanks mom and dad for everything that you've done to get me here.

Can you send those family history stories when you get a chance? I would really like to have those. I think that's the only thing that I need, and those shoes. =)

I love you all!
até proxíma semana!