More Marriages

Hey, so first of all, nobody told me that Elder Wirthlin died! My area is the farthest away from the center of the city, and as we´re without a cellphone, we don´t get too much contact with the rest of the mission. I was at a member´s house when I opened the Liahona and saw the “In Memorial of” page. Yeesh! I feel disconnected with the rest of what´s going on in the church.

This week we had great success in finding another complete family that truly has been prepared to receive the message. On Tuesday we went to an appointment at the appointed time, only to find that the people had forgotten and weren´t home. (Pretty normal, unfortunately). Looking to the trusty “Backup Plan” in the planner, we decided to do some door knocking to teach. The first lesson we taught was pretty lousy, as the lady we taught seemed to not even be listening. She responded like she wasn´t even paying attention to the lesson, so to grab her attention I invited her to be baptized, and she said “Yeah, that´d be nice.”

But, moving on we found success in finding W., his wife Ma..., and their 9 year old son who has a name that I can´t pronounce yet without people laughing at me. They accepted our 1st visit, and when we returned the next day, they had already read parts from the Book of Mormon and had questions, which was a nice breath of fresh air. Wan. works construction and is a bit rough on the edges, but he teared up as told us that he´s been looking for a better way of life for some time now. After the 1st lesson, they told us how they've been having some fights in their marriage. (actually, like almost everybody we teach, they´re not married but we´re working on that one) I felt inspired to teach them about family and couple prayer, and the committed to starting the practice. On the return visit, M... reported that she felt that they were starting to feel more united and that they were fighting less. I was grateful for being able to teach a principle that we´ve always observed (as we´ve always had family prayer) and help others out.

I really received a boost to my testimony about prayer this week. Me and Elder R. felt inspired to teach about marriage, Temple marriage, and the Law of Chastity on the 2nd visit, which is something that I´ve never done before. We prepared a special lesson about all those principles, and they seemed to like the lesson a lot. This coming week we´ll be helping out with their marriage as well. It really was a great blessing to be able to find them.

In other news, we managed to find the keys. Turns out that I left them in a member´s car last Sunday, so I was grateful that we don´t have to jump over the wall anymore.

In today´s plan for P-day, we´ve got a soccer game with some of the young men at the chapel, and then we´re gonna watch “Kung Fu Panda”. (Disney and other animated movies we can watch on P-day.) I´m pushing to get us to watch it in English subtitled in Portuguese instead of the other way around, so we´ll see what happens. It just won´t be the same without Jack Black´s voice coming from the Panda…

‘sall from me.

Till next week”

-Me