May 25, 2010 - Letter Home

Goin and going and goin...

Hey Fam! This week went very fast! I am going to keep this e-mail quick both because it was a slightly uneventful week, an because I have some long personal e-mails to respond to.
It has been an interesting week because it is Elder Carvalho’s first shot at being a District Leader, and so we’ve both tried to come up with a bunch of ideas to help out our district. It’s been actually a really cool motivator. We’ve taken our habit of praying throughout the day and invited the district to make a goal every day for how often they would like to pray, and then we follow up to ask them if they fulfilled their goal for each day; without discussing any numbers or forcing them to do a certain amount of prayers. It’s seemed to have a good effect so far, with a couple of cool experiences happening to the other Elders with this. We’ve done the same with contacts per day and how many times per day the Elders ask for references (from contacts, investigators or members). It’s caused us to want to work harder and be examples for the rest of the district. We’ve also been assigning the Elders to study specific parts of Preach my Gospel, practice them throughout the week, and then come back and have a discussion about what worked and what didn’t. Seeing as how our district meetings are usually one person in the front talking and us occasionally making comments, it’s been really cool: a breath of fresh air. Elder Carvalho is especially fun to work with in this because he’s completely full of new ideas and gets really excited to try out new things. Some mornings the alarm goes off at 6:30 and Elder Carvalho will just jump right up: “Good morning I just had an idea in my sleep we could do this in our district what do you think?!” And I’ll just mutter “Uhuh that sounds good” and roll over and start my groggy bedside morning prayer. It’s like THAT! Hehe.

The work is a bit difficult (I suppose it always is). We’ve been successful finding some good families and teaching them, but it’s been SO difficult to get them to come church. A lot of our good families are evangelicals in slightly poorer neighborhoods who are awesome people, but here every block has an evangelical church, and the people don’t have cars, and getting them to realize that they should come to our church not because it has better speakers or a better band or more comfy chairs but because it’s TRUE is difficult. I will agree with Brendon that it seems like people here treat church like a store: and why would you go across town to buy apples, when your cornerside market has them stocked? Maybe the apples across town are bigger, tastier, cheaper, and more healthy, but isn’t just easier to settle for the apples you’ve already been eating your entire life, especially when it’s close to home?

We just need to bring more of the Spirit, be more in tune with their needs, teach with more clarity so they make the connection that like Jesus Christ formed only one church while he was here on earth, there can only be one true church, and that finding this church needs to be our primary purpose if we want to follow Jesus Christ, and that you can know for yourself the answer if you just ask God with a sincere heart. We just need to be better. Oh well; if it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth it.

My talk last week was on Repentance. I like speaking about Repentance because in the scriptures it seems like this is always of primary importance to the prophets and missionaries, to “preach repentance to every creature”. I used the story about how Dad would always pull out our teeth when they were even barely loose. How does that apply to repentance? I’ll make a long talk short by saying that loose teeth hurt, and we keep playing around with them in our mouth, thinking about them and tweaking with them, but it hurts. Still, I used to hide the fact that I had loose teeth from Dad because having pliers in your mouth is unpleasant and the pain of having your tooth pulled out, while quick and instantaneous, hurts! But afterwards, all is well. I asked the question, what if our baby teeth didn’t fall out automatically after some time? What if they just stayed being annoying and useless and hurting in your mouth indefinately? That’s the situation we have here in our fallen state with sins that simply won’t go away through natural measures. Luckily we have a (Heavenly) father too that is willing to yank our pains out of our heads. He has something more powerful than pliers, which is Christ. But if we hide our pains like I did with my teeth, we’ll keep hurting forever. We need to be humble, accept that there will be a little pain, and go to our Heavenly Father for help. Only then will the pain stop, will we be able to stop thinking about them, and new, stronger teeth (strengths) will be able to grow in the place of our sins.

I did this talk all in Portuguese! How did I feel like I did? Amazingly perfect. I’m sure the only reason that I got a couple blank stares and a couple of strangely placed smirks was because they were stunned or maybe amusingly surprised at my perfect gaucho accent, recollection of words such as “beleaguered” (such as in “I am beleaguered by nightmares of waking up with pliers in my mouth…”), and a stunning display of conjugating a verb in the 2nd-person formal imperative conditional tense. I am that awesome.

Okay, things are going good here! Loving Marau still! I love you guys! The mission is sweet! While there isn’t any huge awesome things happening, there’s uncountable small things that make it worth it. Just talking to people on the street, testifying about Christ, sharing a scripture and feeling the spirit in the homes of people that need it, depending on the Lord in times of sadness and receiving comforting, depending on him in times of frustration and receiving solutions, and just generally opening your heart and trying to show your love to people, even without any huge successes, is what makes this time worth while.

Love love love!
Connor