"Prodigal Children"

Wooh!  Conferência Geral foi increível!  Até Elder Uchtdorf falou em sua propria idioma por um pouco!

 

D, Me, J, L, and Elder U

So what did you all think of the General Conference?  President Monson didn´t speak much, so that was a little wierd.   All in all it was an incredible conference!  I watched the whole thing in Portuguese, and I understood it pretty well.  At times it was difficult to understand because a lot of other people at the church just made chit chat through all the sessions, but it was still pretty cool.  I loved Elder Ulisses Soares´ talk in Portuguese!  It was so awesome to hear the actual voice of the person speaking!  There were some pretty deep talks about grace and the atonement as well.  Man, I can´t wait to get the Conference addition of the Liahona!  It´s going to be so awesome!!!

  Now, about this week!  It started a bit rough.  J. didn´t come to church last week, and we tried and tried and tried again to contact him.  We were finally able to get into his house on Tuesday to share a message with him.  In our district meeting that morning I´d given a short message about the prodigal son, and how each of us are "prodigal children" of our father in heaven.  Elder U. asked me to share the same message with J.  We went there and taught him a special lesson focused completely around this parable, about how God loves us no matter what we do, and how he is there ready to bless us with everything he has no matter how many times we leave, so long as we come back.  It was the most spiritual lesson of my mission so far, I think we all cried at some point.  We taught J. again the next day, and he opened up to us more about what´s going on.  He said that he drank over the weekend and because of that missed church, again.  He figured that after so many failures, we would give up on him and not come back.  Then, we showed up!  And on top of that, we taught him a lesson about no matter how many times we leave our Father in Heaven by commiting sin, he waits with open arms to welcome us back.  This whole week has been incredible becuase of J.  He wants to be baptized more than any other person I´ve seen on my mission, and is on track to be baptized this coming weekend!  There´s a lot of rough things going on in his family right now too, so we´re praying hard for him.

  This week was pretty strange outside of J.  All of the people that we taught just wanted to bible bash, and hour after hour of work seemed to yield so little fruit.  It was so great to be able to leave all of that at the end of each day to go teach J.  He´s pretty awesome.  I´ll attach a photo here of Elder U. and I, J. and his son L, and a recent convert named D. who is teaching J.with us.  D. was my very first baptism on the mission, and seeing him serving faithfully in the church and (hopefully) baptizing J. this coming weekend is just incredible!  There´s no greater joy than this, without question!

 

 I took a picture of lightning!  It took a lot of
shots to finally get one, but it was pretty cool

One of my trainers, Elder S, told me that the mission is the best and worst thing that he´s ever done in his life.  It´s hard.  People yell at you, try to rob you, and just want to fight us on every point of doctrine instead of going to their Heavenly Father in prayer.  With that and more, the mission is the worst thing I´ve done in my life so far.  Every now and then, though, you get to see a life change and to see the joy in the eyes of people as the embrace the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ; there can be no value assigned to that joy.  It surpasses all of the hardships of the mission, and makes it the best thing that I´ve done in my life.

   I love you guys!  Have an awesome week, and remember that I love you!  Also, share your thoughts and insights about conference!  I want to hear!

Love,

Elder Sweet

A Flood!

Hey all!

Flood!

So what´s everybody doing?  I hope things are going well back on the home front!  I know that Landon came back from Paraguay last Wednesday; is he adjusted to the US again yet?  When will you all be headed to Utah to visit Amy and Trevor?  We´ve got General Conference coming again this weekend, that´s pretty exciting!  

    This week went very well, although not a whole lot happened.  Compared to last week, I guess that´s a fairly good thing!  We started teaching a man named A. this week.  He´s very cool!  He works with leather for his living.  He makes belts, pants, shoes, just about anything.  He also repairs saddles.

I´ll attach a pic here of a saddle that he was working on repairing.  He said it´s pretty expensive, but that the guy who bought it bought it online and that it has some mistakes in it that make it nearly un-useable.  He said that he knows everything about saddles, how to make them, how to maintain them, etc.  You can come to him with almost any problem with a horse´s saddle, and he´ll tell you what´s wrong with the saddle and how to fix it.  He´d like to make saddles, but he said it typically takes 3 days to make one saddle, so he focuses on just repairing them and making smaller leather items.  If he brings a couple more people on to work for him, then he´d like to start making saddles.  

   We also taught another family this week!  It´s a father, a mother, and their 3 or 4 year old daughter.  They seemed fairly receptive, especially the mother.  Their daughter was adorable too.  In the middle of the lesson she ran up to me with a terrified look on her face and said ´´There´s a giant rat outside, that eats men!  You can´t stay here, it´s not safe.  It ate my feet!´´  I got a pretty good kick out of that!  

   

Well, that´s the update for the week!  I love you all and hope that everyone has a great week!  Be sure to send E-mails!  I love hearing from you guys!

Love,

Elder Sweet      

5371 - The saddle that I talked about

5318 - A flood!  It rained like crazy several days ago, you should have seen the river.  It was a good 10 feet deeper than usual, and all of the streets became rivers too.  It was pretty fun!

The Power Came Back On! March 23, 2015

Okay, I lied!  It wasn´t just another week, this week was crazy.  It was crazy good, but also crazy tense at several points.  I´ll explain piece by piece.

 

First, I´ll explain how it was intense.  I think it was early Tuesday morning at around 2 o´clock when we got a telephone call from the sister missionaries saying that someone was trying to break into their house.  We live a ways away and hence couldn´t do much to help them, but they called the police and a couple other men from the branch who live close by.  The man who was trying to break into their house ran off, but needless to say it put us on edge.  The sisters live in one of the more dangerous bairros, or neighborhoods, in Itumbiara.  If you go deeper into it it´s practically a favela.  The live outside of that part, but it is still not a very friendly place.  So, the next day my comp and I were walking and... Someone tried to rob me!  He was an aweful thief though, so he lost.  It wasn´t a Shaolin-Ssu packed action story, sorry about that.  He came up to us saying that he needed money for food, and we told him that we didn´t have any.  After that he tried to put a piece of paper in my shirt pocket, and then grabbed everything in my pocket and tried to pull it out.  I grabbed it too so that he couldn´t take it, and then we left.  It was kind of wierd.  I normally wouldn´t have let someone put their hand so close to my pocket, but he was acting like he was a little mentally challenged so I figured I´d cut him some slack.  I´m not doing that again!  Next, in this same day, we were heading to another lesson.  The sun had already set.  We were following a road that should´ve taken us close to the chapel, but we missed the road we needed.  Next thing we knew we were in the favela I talked about, and didn´t know how to get out.  Dangerous neighborhoods in Brazil aren´t like dangerous neighborhoods in the US, it´s a different level entirely.  The ones here aren´t so bad during the day, but they transform into a completely different animal at night.  The streets they´re are a mess, so it´s very difficult to leave the neighborhood.  We were wandering around trying to find our way out, when a little girl came running out to meet us on the street yelling "Elderes!  Elderes!"  It was the little 8 year old girl that the Sister missionaries had taught that asked me to baptize her!  "I want the one who says ´um.´"  Does that ring a bell?  She lived in the house that we were walking past, and knew how to get to the chapel.  She described how to leave the nieghborhood and off we went.  

   The next day Elder U. and I were on our way to a lesson when the power went out across half of the city.  The sun went down, and then we were in the dark.  The sisters called us and said that they were on their way into that same neighborhood that I just talked about when the power went out.  We said "Don´t go in their Sisters!"  We arranged to meet them in a safer part of town, and then we were going to walk them in to their house.  We met them at the house of a recent convert, and just stayed their for a little bit.  We were hoping that the power would come back on so we wouldn´t have to walk through this neighborhood at night with absolutely no light.  We waited, and waited, and waited.  The lights stayed out, and it was getting later.  We decided that walking through that neighborhood at 8pm without light would be better than at 9pm without lights, so we started to get up to leave.  I was literally in the act of going from a sitting position to a standing position when the power came back on!  The sister missionaries started screaming and chearing with relief, and Elder U. and I just sat down and took a deep breath.  We were pretty happy that we didn´t have to go into that neighborhood at night.  God takes care of his missionaries!

   That´s the gist of the week.  It was an awesome week, definitely not one to forget anytime soon.  We reached all of our goals, and we saw the hand of the Lord in our lives almost everyday.  It was tense at times, but we learned and grew from it.

Have an awesome week, family!

Love,

Elder Sweet

FHE Adventure!

Hey guys!

 I hope everyone´s doing great in the states!  Brazil´s still going pretty great :)  Keep me up to date on what´s going on in your lives, I love getting E-mails!  I don´t always have time to respond to each one, but it´s always a pleasure to read letters from you all and see how everyone´s doing.

   There´s two main things that I want to talk about in this E-mail today: Transfers and an Adventure that we had!  First, transfers.

   So, there´s good news and good news.  Which do you want first?  Let´s start with the good news!  First, we´re part of Zone Uberlândia now!  Uberlândia is closer than Rio Verde (our old zone), so it makes more sense for us to go there for Zone meetings and such.  Second (this is the good part), drumroll!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! dumdumdumdumdumdumdumdumdumdumdumdumdum... BOOM!!!!  No one in Itumbiara was transferred!  We´re all staying here, with our same comps.  I´m excited for the opportunity that I have to stay here, there are several investigators that we´re working with right now that I really want to see baptized.  So, that´s what happened!

 

 Next, the adventure.  We had a Family Home Evening last night that we needed to go to because they were going to bring some new investigators for us to teach.  This home is quite a ways away from us, it´s about a 45 or 50 minute walk if we take a shortcut through a field.  The sun had already set, and we were approaching this field.  First we have to cross a little bridge over a creek with a bunch of trees on either side of the bank, and then there´s a path through tall grass that takes us to the other end of the field.  There´s always several horses grazing in the field too, so that should help you guys with the image.  Anyhow, it was dark.  As we approached the entrance to the path, we saw 7 young men gathered around the entrance to the pass smoking something.  Generally speaking, when 7 young men go to a fairly remote part of town and hide in the cover of trees to smoke, they´re not smoking tobacco.  Elder Uboldi and I decided that a detour was better than risking a confrontation, so we continued down the road that runs along the field.  We thought that there was another road that cut through the field a bit further down, but there wasn´t.  To walk all the way around would have added a good 1.5 or 2 kilometers to our trip (I´ve given miles guys, sorry), so we decided to cut through the field.  We found a little trail, and followed it.  It took us into the trees, and then we ran into the creek.  At this point, the creek was probably 6 or 8 feet wide (haven´t given feet up yet, I still like ´em), with a thin branch spanning the width of it on the ground.  My comp put one foot on it, realized that it was very unstable, and then stepped off.  I was describing another method that we could use to cross when we heard "Neeeeeeee-eeee-awwww-eeeee-awww."  My comp said "Okay, let´s go!"  I told him "Elder, it´s just a donkey; we can do this!"  With a bit of persuading, we resumed our attempts to cross the river.  I crossed first, walking on the thin branch to cross the river while holding on the trees above to balance myself, and then Elder U. followed suit.  We arrived on the other side, and started crossing the field.  The tall grass made it so we couldn´t run because we couldn´t see the ground well, so we were left with doing our best to cross the field.  We eventually emerged from the field at a road on the other side, and then walked to the family´s house that we had the appointment with.  Anyhow, that´s the adventure of the week!  I hope you guys enjoyed it!

Now, the pics:

5297 - A pic we took after the FHE I talked about

5285 - A really awesome sunset I took a picture of!

Have a wonderful week, learn lots, and preach the gospel!  Until next Monday.

Love,

Elder Sweet

"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

Complete and Total Devotion

Iaí, Família!  Como voces estão?

   This week was pretty awesome and pretty hard at the same time, let me explain!  Elder Uboldi and I worked harder this week than we´ve ever worked before.  We worked and worked and worked and marked appointment after appointment after appointment!  On the other end of things, our lunches where on the other side of the world basically every day.  One lady lived somewhere in the Sahara Desert, I think.  We had to traverse the Amazon, go through Panama, up through central america into Mexico, and then cross the great plains of the United States.  After that we went up through Canada to Alaska, prayed and fasted for fourty days to part the Bering sea, crossed the Bering strait on dry land, marched across Siberia, traversed the Urals and descended in Israel, then Egypt, and then we arrived in the Sahara.  We then wandered in the desert for fourty years, living off of nothing but manna and the dew that collected on beatle shells each morning before finding the lady who had signed up to feed us.  Going back was easier because they´d bridged the Bering strait by that time.  Anyhow, we still haven´t recovered from that journey but we´re planning to nap some today.  That will help, I think!

   We marked a lot of appointments this week, but almost all of them fell through.  We have several new investigators, and I´ll keep you up to date on them as time goes on.  One is a family that we talked to on the street.  They´re very well educated and understood the scriptures we had them read.  It was awesome!  Another is a 17 year old girl and her sister.  They told us that just based on our explanation of the restoration they knew it was true.  That was cool!  During that lesson something really funny happened too.  We always begin our lessons with prayer, and we usually ask whomever we are teaching if there is anything that they would like us to ask for for them in our prayer.  Now here´s where things get tricky.  The portuguese verb that means ´´to ask for´´ is pedir.  It´s irregular, and I´m still working on the irregular verbs.  The actual conjugation of pedir for ´´I ask for´´ is ´´peço,´´ but if you follow the regular conjugation it comes out as ´´pedo.´´  Funny enough, the portuguese verb ´´to fart´´ is pedar.  When we were opening the lesson, I couldn´t remember how to conjugate pedir so I gave it my best shot.  What came out was ´´Is there anything that I can fart for your in this prayer?´´  Yup.  That happened.  I struggled the whole rest of the lesson to hold back my laughter, at times I just had to bury my face in my hands and try to beat that memory out of my mind while my companion taught!  It was pretty awesome!

   Finally, this morning I read some words and talks from our prophets.  I read ´´O Cristo Vivo (The Living Christ),´´ which is one of the most incredible testimonies of Christ that there are to be found.  How grateful we should be to have living prophets on the earth today to guide us.  What an incredible gift!  As I read their words I cannot help but feel a deep respect and love for these men.  We need to make feasting on their words a priority in our lives and in our studies.  There are incredible messages, vital advice, and powerful testimonies to be found therein, and we take advantage of a marvelous opportunity for spiritual growth each time we read the words of living prophets.  I especially love the words of President Boyd K. Packer in his talk ´´The Witness.´´  In this talk he said the following:

  After all the years that I have lived and taught and served, after the millions of miles I have traveled around the world, with all that I have experienced, there is one great truth that I would share. That is my witness of the Savior Jesus Christ.

Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon recorded the following after a sacred experience:

“And now, after the many testimonies which have been given of him, this is the testimony, last of all, which we give of him: That he lives!

“For we saw him” (D&C 76:22–23).

Their words are my words.

I believe and I am sure that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that He lives. He is the Only Begotten of the Father, and “by him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God” (D&C 76:24).

I bear my witness that the Savior lives. I know the Lord. I am His witness. I know of His great sacrifice and eternal love for all of Heavenly Father’s children. I bear my special witness in all humility but with absolute certainty, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

It doesn´t get much better than that.  How blessed we are to have living apostles, even prophets, to guide us, and to testify of Jesus Christ.  Let´s make truly being a disciple of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, priority number one in our lives.  There is no greater happiness to be found than that which lies in complete and total devotion to Jesus Christ.

I love you all!  I feel your prayers everyday and treasure every one of your words.  I love you, miss you, and pray for.  Until next monday!

Love,
Elder Sweet

P.S. - Transfer calls are this coming sunday!  Our ward mission leader had a dream that I had a new companion who didn´t speak protuguese.  Maybe it´s a sign lol!  I´ll keep you guys up to date :)

"I need this!"

First, we got a new Elder here!  He´s Elder M, he was my comp in Arizona!!!  Just kidding, but he is Elder M.  He's from the United States, which means he speaks English.  We still basically never speak English, but it´s nice to have someone here who speaks my language finally.  Elder M. is continuing the training of Elder P, and Elder U, and I are comps again.

Rain!

   

 Second, we got two really cool new investigators this week.  Our Branch president is awesome.    He´s really young, I don´t think he even has 2 full years off of his mission yet.  He´s married and has a child though, and is full of energy and super missionary oriented (like you, Dad!).  Anyhow, he gave us a referral that we went to visit several days ago.  We knocked the door, and the girl that he´d referred us to wasn´t there but her sister was.  It was raining really hard, so she invited us in and we sat down and started talking to her.  It turned out she had absolutely no idea who we were, what we were doing, or what church we were from.  That´s pretty trusting, maybe it was our accents that got us in the door.  Anyhow, we talked with her a bit and she was super cool.  We left a pamphlet about the restoration with her (because she said that she likes to read), and planned to return the following day to hopefully find her and her sister there together.  When we showed up the next day, they were both there.  We talked for them for a while just to get to know them, and then after that we taught lesson 1.  It wasn´t the most technically perfect lesson that we´ve ever taught, but the spirit was there without a doubt.  The older sister, the one who we left the pamphlet with, had read the whole thing too!  She remembered things from it and already knew more or less what we were going to say.  It was pretty cool.  They both wanted to be baptized!  We´re still working with them, I´ll keep you up to date on how that goes.

   Third!  At the beginning of the last transfer, Elder A. and I had an investigator that we had taught the first lesson too.  He accepted a baptismal date, but then the emergency transfer happened.  My new companion and I weren´t able to visit him for awhile, and when we did he either wasn´t there or didn´t want to talk to us (I´m not sure which).  After several tries, we moved on.  Yesterday Elder U. and I were on our way to knock some doors near where he lives, and the thought ocurred to me that we could stop by him again.  It was the first time I´d thought about him in awhile, but nothing spectacular.  We caught him right as we was arriving at his house, and he invited us in.  We talked with him a bit, and found that a lot has happened to him in the past several weeks.  A series of events had occurred that culminated in his wife leaving two weeks ago, and he was in a really low spot.  We just talked to him for a while, and then shared a message with him.  We talked about how through the covenant of baptism we can have the Holy Spirit with us continuously, and how the bible teaches us that the fruits of the spirit are peace, love, patience, etc.  After we shared this message with him he told us how much better he felt as a result of our words, that they were exactly what he needed to hear then.  He said that he was happier than he´d been in a long time.  We asked him if he´d like to prepare himself to be baptized, and he said  ´´Would I like too?  It doesn´t matter if I´d like to or not, I need this!´´  We closed with a prayer, wiped the tears out of our eyes quickly, and headed out.  He told us as we were leaving that we came at the perfect moment for him, the moment when he needed us the most.  

   Elder Bednar spoke at the MTC about recognizing the spirit.  He said that if we are being ´´a good boy´´ or ´´a good girl,´´ keeping our covenants and living the gospel, then our ´´steps will be guided, your words will be directed.´´  It´s so neat to see this principle at work here in our area in Brazil.  The spirit didn´t come down, smack us with a 2x4, and tell us that we needed to visit José.  Instead, it came as a casual thought, nothing extraordinary.  When we are worthy, we are entitled to such guidance and will receive such guidance whether or not we realize it. 

   I´ve also been thinking a lot about love lately, and how charity should be my motive for working as a missionary.  I´ve read 2 Nephi 33 over and over again in my free time this week, and am praying for help and striving to apply those principles in my work.  We´re not just called to preach, but to minister.  I know of few greater pictures of what it means to minister than that given in 2 Nephi 33.  If you have the time, give it a read!

   Well, I´ve got to go now!  I love you guys, have a wonderful week!

Love,

Elder Sweet