11/04/2008

Hello Everyone,

How are things? back home mail (email too) has been strangly quiet.... But things are going good here, this Saturday we will most likely have my first babtism. Which is really excuting. Jaciane is very cool we have been teaching her for about a month. Its really intresting, we started teaching her mom, then her brother in a different house, then she started showing up for a few of the lessons with her brother. About a month later we thought about it. And asked if we could teach her seperate. Now we are babtising her. Her brother and mother stopped progressing a long time ago. But she is really really cool, though she is very timid. She doesnt want to pray out loud, she has a testimony and knows that our message is true, and she is feeling the spirit and recieving blessings. But doesnt want to pray in front of people. She has been to church 6 times now, and even though she is timid she went to confrence with us in another city. With people she doesnt even know. The week after we should babtise 4 friends of one of the teenagers here. Luiz Felipe is really cool, his mom was converted about a year ago and a few months after he was babtised. But he has lived a life a little more difficult then all the other youth in the Branch, so its really good that his friends are accepting our messages so he can grow with them. We are doing lots of work with the youth here, the adults are cool, but they gossip so much is really difficult to work with them. Elder Bemuyal is a good Elder, its a little difficult working with him because he doesnt really care about the rules, he wants to work (most of the time) but ahh rules arent really important. So I am working on him, its intresting beacsue with Elder Torres, I didnt make any decisions, but here I do all the planning and quite a bit of the talking with people. So I am learning by being thrown into the frying pan. My arm has been hurting a little bit lately, I have a feeling that he will never heal. Its so strange people when I got my call to Brazil I thought that the people would be more inclined to accept more knowledge about Christ, and its true of every other mission here in Brazil. This mission is difficult, something of intrest, at the end of this transfer the beginning of December, I will have more time on my mission then half of the missionaries. I think I will become senior at the next transfer. But I dont know if thats a good thing, I have lot of things to learn still before I can teach another person how to do missionary work, and while my companion is lazy here and I am learning a lot, my progress is also retarted by his lazyness. I have been thinking about the APE for President Rau, there are a few things that you can do with the youth that can help them a ton. First, its good to start your mission with a Lesson Plan for every lesson that a missionary will teach, people will do this in the MTC and mission prep classes, but if they have one before they can use that time for perfecting instead of creating. Two in the last zone confrence we were challenged to make a good question for every key point of every principle. For example in the first lession there are eight principles. God our Heavenly Father, the Gospel Blesses our Families, Prophets. Each one of these has 3 or 4 points that missionarys need to talk about. If they were to have questions prepared before they came they will be able to teach exponetially better. Three, we live in the gospel and we know the blessing but at times its really difficult to explain to someone who doesnt have a background of faith, what those blessings are. When you say to someone your faimly can be together for eternity, they know what the words mean but dont understand the concept. When you say I know Jesus is my savior, they dont really understand the purpose of Jesus Crist in the plan of salvation and how dependant we are on him. The truth is lot of missionarys dont understand fully about this. But thats not the third point. They need to know how to explain to someone what the advantages are of the gospel without saying your life will be blessed. That is so vauge, if they say that they need to do it with the spirit. But those things and preach my Gospel, it may be a little difficult to teach some of these things effectivly in a short amount of time like the ape but they are some ideas of things. Well alex was the only person that sent me an email so I dont have a lot to say. Until next week Elder Simpson.