Time Goes by Fast - September 14

Sunrise Goiania, Brazil
(Picture from the internet)

Okeydoke!  I´ve got to be fast (again), sorry about that!

Really quickly!  We´re teaching a cool family right now!  We got a reference from the church media, some people in our area had asked for a book of mormon on Mormon.org.  So, we went there and taught them, and they want to be baptized!  It´s awesome!  Their names are F. and D, and they´ve got a baptismal date for the 26th of September.

R. wasn´t able to go to church this week, but we´re going to keep passing by to see if he´s really interested or not.  

Anyhow, we´re working our butts off here!  I´ve never worked so hard in my mission, but man is it fun!  I just can´t believe how fast the time goes by though, it´s actually a bit scary.  Yesterday we were working and I felt like it should have been 3 or 4 in the afternoon, but then the sky got dark all of a sudden!

Sunset Goiania, Brazil
(Picture from the internet)

It was 7 at night already, it´s nuts how fast the time flies.  But I am loving my mission and I miss you guys a ton!

Got to go already, but I love each and everyone of you!

Love,

Elder Sweet

Serve a Mission

I. Square (Photo from Wikipedia)

Hey guys!  I´ve got to be quick today, but how´s everyone doing?

So, really quick here let me tell you about some awesome investigators that we have right now!  First: R!  

He´s 23 years old and super cool.  He sings rap and works at a food stand at a local park that sells these awesome brazilian style hamburgers (google X-Tudo Hamburger, that´s your typical brazilians burger) and these giant omelettes!  It´s pretty great!  He´s loving everything about the gospel and recieved an answer about the Book of Mormon in the middle of the lesson when we taught him about it!  This morning after studies we went to his house and watched the Joseph Smith video with him, he said he was fighting to not cry at several parts.  He´s pretty well set in his determination to be baptized!  So pray for him!

We´re also teaching a family right now, there names are J. (Dad), L. (Mom), A, A.(Sons).  They´re a great family and they went to church last sunday.  We talked with J. yesterday night and he said that he wants to go to church one more time, but that after that he wants his whole family to be baptized!  He already knows that they´ll have to get legally married first, so we´re helping make the steps towards that goal.  It´ll be my first wedding in the mission!  They´re a super cool family and they love the gospel!

So this week is going to be great and we´re going to work until we can´t work anymore!  It´s going to be a week full of miracles, I can´t wait to tell you guys about it!

Word of Wisdom to all, Serve a mission!

Love you guys!

Elder Sweet

Hey Everyone

Here´s one picture from outside our house.  There are these giant, super awesome apartment buildings in the middle of our area.  It´s gives a pretty stark comparison because they´re the only buildings with more than two stories for miles. 

So what´s everybody up to?  It looks like things are going well for everyone up in the states, and things are going great down here!  Let me tell you about it!

   My companion rocks.  He´s in his last transfer on the mission and after that he´ll return to Chile.  He isn´t a little bit "dead" to use missionary lingo, but is working his butt off with every hour, minute, and second that we have.  

It´s great!  This week I learned a ton about the relationship between hard work and smart work, and how we have to have the two together to be succesful.  We worked harder and smarter this week than I´ve ever worked, and I´m learning so much!  The mission really is the best experience in the world, so serve a mission!!!

   Right now we´re trying to help the missionaries here do two things, invite EVERYONE to be baptized and talk to lots of people.  Many times as missionaries we judge people and decide that they aren´t interested in the gospel, and so we don´t even invite them to be baptized or come to church.  We´re encouraging the missionaries to invite everyone to be baptized, without deciding for ourselves first if they´ll accept or not.  We had a neat experience with this yesterday, when Elder M. and I were teaching a man that we found knocking doors yesterday.  As we talked to him he didn´t seem to be to interested, but he said that he´d be able to go to church next sunday so we decided to enter the house and teach him.  We got in the house, said a prayer, and taught him about baptism.  Even though he didn´t seem to be too interested, we still invited him to be baptized and he accepted!  He seemed to get a bit more interested after the invitation to baptism.  This is just one of many instances that we see the importance of this priciple.  So, moral of the story: Don´t judge people!  Just invite everyone to hear the gospel and let them decide if they want it or not.

   I hope that all of you have an excellent week, and I love each one of you!  Always remember the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and pray earnestly to comprehend and appreciate more deeply his incredible gift to us.  This is the foundation to conversion!  Got to go now, but keep being awesome, tá?

Falou!!!!!   E boa semana para tudo o mundo!

Elder Sweet

I didn´t take a lot of pictures this week, but I´ll do better this next time around!   Anywho, more pictures to come next week, I promise!

"Changes" August 24, 2015

Família!

Me and Elder M.!

How´s everyone doing?  Thanks so much for sending the awesome photos and videos from the family reunion!  It looks like it was a blast!  That´s pretty cool that you guys got a motor home too!  Dad, I think a trip up to Capitol Reef is in order when I get back!

Okay, so here´s some news for you.  President wasn´t too impressed with my work as Financial Secretary, so I got transferred!  I didn´t see that coming, but it was one of the "changes" that I mentioned in my previous E-mail.  This transfer I´m in a part of Goiânia called Ipiranga, my companion (Elder M.) and I are the Zone Leaders of the Goiânia North Zone.  He´s Zone Leader 1 and has a lot more experience than I do, so I´m pretty grateful for that!  I was pretty, well, I think terrified out of my mind´s the right word here, when I was coming into this transfer, but Elder M. is really motivated, sincere, and has made it very clear that he´s here to help me learn!  I´m going to need that help for sure!

So, about the mission tour!  It was incredible!  Elder T. is the Area authority that came to visit the mission, and what an incredible experience that was!  He spoke about faith, prayer, charity, it was incredible!  I want so badly to see everyone that I know go on a mission just to have the opportunity to be taught by such incredible servants of the Lord.  Elder T. had a very neat kind of humility to him, and as he spoke I felt so strongly the Holy Ghost testifying to me that he is a servant of the Lord.  He told us about "the veil of unbelief" (See Ether 4:15) and how we must break this veil in our lives to become servants through whom the Lord can work miracles.  He taught us how to counsel with the Lord in our prayers, and emphasized the importance of inviting not just to come to church on sunday or be baptized, but invite them to come unto Christ.  He did several roll-plays with the missionaries and it was incredible to see the love of the Lord that he conveyed.  When the mission tour came to an end, he threw us a curve-ball and asked President K. for permission to say the closing prayer himself.  It was so neat to here one of the Lord´s Seventies praying!  

I want so badly that everyone can serve a mission!  There opportunities to learn to love God´s children and be taught by his servants that are incredible but only exist on the mission.  What a marvellous blessing from the Lord is a call to serve a mission!  So go serve a mission!!!  Everyone!  Do whatever you need to do to put your life and testimony in line to serve him.  The two years are so short, but so rich with growth in knowledge, charity, spirit, testimony, and in our relationship with our Heavenly Father!  So, serve a mission!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I's  baptism on Saturday!  

The sisters had three investigators who chose to get baptized on that day too, 

so it was a good crowd!  I. is in white at the top left of the photo.

I´ve got to go now, but I love each and every one of you!  You are all chosen children of a divine being, a God who loves us and wants each of us to have joy.  Trust in his wisdom and knowledge of how to obtain that joy, because he knows how to have it so much better than we do!  Seek to learn his word and live it!

Have a wonderful week!

Love,

Elder Sweet

Another picture of I's baptism!

P.S. Landon, check your E-mail!  

The Book of Mormon is the Word of God

Hey guys!
 What´s everybody doing?  Anything cool?  Tell me these things!  

This one´s of the staff!  From left to right,
Elder C., Elder T., Elder S. and Me!

Okay, so this weeks going to be pretty crazy here in the office!  We have a mission tour, and after that it´s already transfers.  Crazy, right?  We´ve got to coordenate the transfers as well and help everyone get to their new areas.  We´ve been working a lot in the past week!   Elder T, one of the Seventy, is going to visit the mission and give some training to us.  It´s going to be great!  Tomorrow the AP´s are coming into town to help us coordenate the mission tour, and then the other missionaries will start arriving.

The rest of the mission office

Next, this week I got to see how President Kuceki does the transfers.  I didn´t have quite the same image of how he does it, it really changed my perspective.  It is completely based on inspiration; I´ve got a much stronger testimony of that now.  President was working on the transfers last tuesday, and held a meeting with us that afternoon and told us what was going to happen in the transfer.  He explained what he was going to do with each of us and with some of the other missionaries, and then said that he just needed to say a prayer and get a confirmation from Heavenly Father that that was indeed what he wanted.  We finished the meeting and he entered his office again while we went back to work.  Then the time went passing by, and he didn´t come out.  10 minutes, 30 minutes, I think he passed a little over an hour in his office.  As we were getting ready to leave, President Kuceki came out of his office, smiled, and said "It changed!"  He then invited us into his office and showed us where each of the missionaries would be.  It was really neat to hear him explain it!  A lot of things had changed from what he had explained before, and with many of the transfers he told us that he didn´t understand why the Lord wanted so-and-so in such-and-such a position, etc.  It´s someting that´s difficult to explain, but my testimony in the fact that the Lord guides his church has certainly grown as a result of seeing President Kuceki doing the transfers.

   

   Finally, I. will get baptized this saturday!  We´re really excited for her, it´s been such a neat experience teaching her.  She studies a lot, I´ve never taught anyone that put so much time and effort into studying and understanding what we leave with her.  We spent a whole lesson explaining her questions about 2 Nephi 2:5-7, she wanted to understand the atonement well!  We´re really excited for her baptism, so keep praying for her!

Our "salinha,"this is where the Finance Secretaries do our work!

   Okey-doke, I´ve got to go!  I love you all so much, and i know that Christ lives!  The Book of Mormon is the word of God, and anyone who reads and ponders it with an open heart, and then asks God can know that.  What a marvellous promise!  I love you all so much, have a wonderful week!

Elder S.

The Night the Lights Went Out

Hey all!

   Okey-doke, let me tell you guys a bit about this week!  First, sorry for not sending any pictures last week, the LAN house that we went to has a reputation for somehow deleting all of the pictures on storage devices that are used there, so I tried to avoid the risk!  This week went pretty great, though!

Isa. traveled this weekend to visit her Dad in Brasília, and will travel up there this weekend as well.  So, we've remarked her baptismal date for the 22 of August, and she´s excited for it!  She also started reading the Book of Mormon from the beginning and is loving it.  She especially enjoyed Lehi´s vision of the tree of life and the explanation of that vision given in

Nephi´s vision.  It´s so awesome to see someone who just loves everything about the gospel!

On another day this past week we got home at night and found that our lights weren´t on.  Elder T. and I knew that we had paid the energy bill, so we were a little confused about why that happened.  Anywho, our land lady lent us some candles and we got to do our planning by candlelight!

 Elder Santos at the desk the night the lights went out. 
We´ve since organized our desks a little better to reduce
the fire risk should that happen again lol!  

It reminded me of a talk by President Monso (https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2010/10/the-divine-gift-of-gratitude?lang=eng)
where he talked about a family that had used candlelight for many years, but then managed to get electricity.  During a year especially difficult for them (they were farmers), the heavy rains had destroyed all of their crops, with the exception of just a few turnips.  That thanksgiving they had nothing but a rabbit to eat with their turnips, and the children were so upset by the lack of substance to provide them with "something to be thankful for."  To try to bring things into perspective, the father asked his children to fetch the old oil lamps and candles that they had used in the past and to light them.  They then turned off all of the electric lights in the house, and they could hardly believe how dark it had been all of those years that they had lived by candlelight.  The children, struck by the contrast in lighting, suddenly realized that they had a lot to be thankful for, and even in a tough year they had still been abundantly blessed.  We figured out the problem with our electricity the next day, but I was able to take some pictures first!  I´ll attachthem to this E-mail.

   The work as Financial Secretary´s going pretty well, too!  I´ve gotten hang of almost everything except the houses.  There´s always something that we´ve never seen before going on with the houses: missionaries who just move into a new house without giving us time to get a contract put together or not even lettinng us know, landlords that want a rent increase, the law company needing us to update the data on the houses, etc.  I´m still lost when we start working on the houses, but I´ll get up to speed there eventually!  It is a lot of fun, I´m pretty excited!  

   In two weeks an Area Seventy is going to visit the mission too.  This week is going to be pretty busy for us because we´ve got to buy all of the bus tickets to bring all the missionaries in the mission to Goiânia, and then the next week is going to be the visit from the seventy and that´s going to be crazy as well.  The week after that is transfers, and that too will be crazy!  But crazy´s good!  We enjoy the challenge!

Brazilian BBQ for P-day!  It was my first time trying Picanha,

 it´s the king of the cuts here in Brazil!  It was pretty dang good,

 i´ll be honest.  We made Garlic Bread on the grill too, try it!

 I´ve got to take off now, but here´re some pics for yáll!  Have an awesome week!

Love,

Elder Sweet

Faith Is Like A Seed

Hey guys!  Great news!

   So the girl that I talked about last week, I., is going to get baptized on Saturday!  She´s one of the best investigators I´ve ever had, she understands everything that we teach her and everything that she reads in the scriptures.

Image from Gatewaybelievers.com

We left Alma 32 with her to read after teaching her and inviting her to pray and ask God if what we taught her is true, and we had a surprise when we returned for the next visit.  She´d marked up the whole chapter, underlining some parts, highlighting others, and proceeded to teach us the lesson that we had planned for her.  She understood everything!  She understood what we need to do to obtain an answer from God, why at times people don´t receive answers and what needs to be changed in our hearts so that we can receive an answer.  It was so great!  She´s already made friends with all of the girls in the Young Women´s organization and goes to all of their activities on her own, she´s as golden an investigator as they come!

   This week Elder S. and I are going to focus on preparing her for baptism and finding some more good investigators.  It´s amazing how many people there are that are prepared and ready to receive the message of the fulness of the gospel.  The more I learn about missionary work the more and more I see how little it is that we do, and how much the Lord does in the conversion of people.  He prepares them, guides them to us or us to them, sends the spirit to testify, etc.  We are a very small piece in a grand image that shows how much he loves us!  As we look for these kinds of experiences in our lives, we´ll see how much he blesses us!

image from apiopa.org

Got to go now, but I love you all so much!  Have an awesome week!

Love,

Elder Sweet