October 5, 2010 - Letter Home

"Livin Life at High Velocity"

Tiobira

Why?

Another Bad Idea

Hey evrabody!


Very nice to be with you all again! What a great feeling to see a full inbox after a hard week! It’s been a lot of work. So what did we do exactly? 

Serious!

we're gonna eat it!

Ribeiro and armadillo 4 ever

Get your paws off a my baby!

gauch∆o

ANSWER ME!

Can I keep it?

This week was a week of baptismal invites. I was in search of an answer last P-day, trying to answer for myself why anyone would want to get baptized in the next couple weeks when, to my way of thinking, they could easily just take their time to gain a testimony and wait until they were ready to join the church. After reading my Dad’s letter last week, it all completely clicked. Dad’s letter was about each phase of our lives, in segments of 10 years, and the ideal way to live those parts of your life and gain the most happiness out of each one. What clicked for me was that the stages of life and the ability to be happy in each later stage depended on the earlier stages. Sure you can be happy at any stage of your life by starting now, repenting, and deciding to live a life based on Christ, but you could have been much happier had you started earlier. 
I pretty much just related this idea to 5 investigators after asking them what their goals were in their life, added in my testimony and following the spirit, and it became very logical that the best thing for them to do would be to start getting on the ball now and preparing for baptism. Dylan, Roberto, Christielle, Tainara and Aneici accepted the invite to prepare for baptism on the 23rd of this month! Awesome. So I’m really honing that message so as to have it as a rule of thumb for any of my future baptismal invites. Very exciting!

Although I am really trying to figure out plans for how to teach people in the best form possible, what’s happened as an unintended side effect is that I’m starting to look for the spirit in ways that I’ve never thought of before. Thinking about the necessity of everyone to repent and be baptised and follow Christ has gotten me to plead, plead with God in the middle of the lessons and day and night to be able to know what it is I need to do with each one of my investigators to help them be baptized. 
Before, I was taking the approach of teaching and hoping that the spirit testified along with me and that the investigators would realize themselves how the doctrine would be valuable to them in their lives, but now I am really searching to be guided  to say the exactly right thing so that people can make the click that we are sent by God and that what we’re saying is true.

Man, it’s been a great week because I’ve been blessed to know exactly what to say in a few occasions, but it’s also getting pretty hard. There’s some sad people here with a lot of problems that need a lot of help, and when you’re striving with the people like this, you feel a lot of their sadness and their defeats become your defeats too. Until now with these investigators it seems like I’m just sharing with them a lot of their struggles and sadnesses, and sure, when they have successes it’s gonna be awesome to share that too, but I’m not there yet. 

Yeah, so I’m going through Moses 7:41-44 right now. Let’s hope I get to verse 47! Yeah!

What’s nice is that while I feel sad for other people, I know that I’m doing what I need to be doing, and that I’m being guided by the Spirit to do exactly what God wants me to do. That’s a really great feeling, something I haven’t felt in as much abundance as I feel here, and something that I want to be with me forever. 
It’s a bit scary, but I want more of that. I know I still have a lot to learn and to do and to perfect, but it is nice to know that there is always more room for changes in your life. I’ve already felt like I’ve changed how I look at life a million times now on the mission, but here comes another. How cool :). 

All of your prayers are very appreciated and are definitely making an effect out here in Porto Alegre, Brasil.

Elder Ribeiro

Important Phone Call

Conference was awesome, but a bit of a letdown that we didn’t get to watch that much. We only got to watch the last session :(. The transmission here started at 1:00 and 5:00, and we planned to go to every session but the members started lunch late (even though we asked for them to start early) and so we couldn’t get our rides to the stake center to watch the sessions. Luckily! We were walking along at 4:30 Sunday and a member happened returned to our area from the conference to get someone else and passed by and managed to pick us up! So we got to watch a part of conference. Yes! 
Dieter F. Uchtdorf pulled it off perfectly and won my reward for most meaningful talk of all the talks I watched, especially because I was looking to figure out how I could avoid the pride cycle in mission life. Dieter is the man!

(read, listen or see it here: http://new.lds.org/general-conference/2010/10/pride-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng
 
Anyway, I’m still here in Brasil, having fun and learning alot and pretty much just living life at high velocity, time is flying by super fast and it really is scaring me! I still feel homesick once in a while but it’s more than worth it to be making differences here in people’s lives and getting to know all the family that has been waiting here to get to know me my entire life. Mission is awesome!
 

"igreja" means church

mapadacious

newbies

"waitin for the district leader"

Super District

"Elber and Anapaula"

The Barbosas

The Barbosas2

Love you guys! Hope all is well! Have a good week!

Elder Connor


p.s. This weeks photo dump has a video in it with .3gp media format. 
 It's the most compressable. Family, you can upload that file to youtube and it'll play fine.

Enjoy!