"Have You Prayed Yet?" March 9, 2015

Wooh!!!

    

Batizamos!  J, one of the two sisters that we started teaching a couple weeks ago, got baptized!  Her stepdad is reading the Book of Mormon too, so hopefully we´ll see something develop there soon.

   This week was pretty interesting!  First, let´s talk about J.  He went to church the week before last, and the teacher in Gospel Principles gave everyone something to put on their fridge that said ´´Você já orou?´´  That means "Have you prayed yet?"  Monday morning when J. was getting ready for work, he saw this and decided to pray.  He called is 8 year old son in and they prayed together.  J. said that the day in general went great, far better than it usually does.  In addition to this, he set goals to stop drinking coffee, beer, and smoking.  This is especially remarkable when you realize that we hadn´t even taught him the word of wisdom yet!  He just thought he needed to curb those habits to be a better father.  (Coffee was kind of interesting because it´s not the kind of thing that people generally try to quit.  When we asked J. about this, he said that he was drinking more than 2 liters of coffee a day.  He realized that in his case it had become a vice and that he needed to quit.)  (Note 2 - I had trouble translating that from Portuguese!!! I knew what I wanted to say in Portuguese, but I had to think about it for a bit to figure out how to say it in English.  Wooh!!!)  Anyhow, prayer is an incredibly powerful tool.

   Another really interesting thing happened this week.  I was on splits with Elder M, and we were going to do J's baptismal interview.  We were walking down the street and saw a bit of a commotion on the other side.  We stopped to see what was going on.  Several police had stopped a woman on a motorbike, and were apparently not very happy with her.  They had surrounded her and were speaking to her rather angrily.  One of the police kicked a water bottle out of her hand, pointed at her and started yelling.  She got off of the bike, and then the police officer that had been yelling at her kicked it down.  The seat broke off, and then he took his knife and popped both of the tires on the bike.  I´m not sure what she did that ticked them off so much, but whatever it was it was petty enough for them to let her just walk away afterwards.  I was really surprised to see that.  We really are lucky to live where we do.  A lot of times we make a big fuss about how aweful we think our government is, and how much we don´t like this or that about our country.  All things considered though, we have one of the least corrupt governments on the planet (the twelfth least corrupt government if I remember the statistic right), and police that generally speaking work for public peace, not personal gain.  Remember that we´ve got it good, and we need to be grateful and give thanks to God for what we have!

   We´ll actually hear about transfers next week, so I´ll keep you guys up to date.  We´ll also go to Uberlândia this week for a conference with President Kuceki.  I´m pretty excited about that!

I love you guys so much!  Have a wonderful week and I look forward to reading your E-mails next monday!

Elder Sweet