Week 69-- New Year!!

Hello everyone-- Happy New Year!!

So this week is transfers again, but I´m staying so I don´t care! I´m excited really, we´ve got 4 or 5 baptisms lined up for this next transfer and I love everyone here so that´s great. This will be tied for my longest area now when this transfer ends, and I´ll have spent almost half my time in Brazil here. Should be some good weeks to come! 

Um, this week was pretty uneventful with Christmas and all but it was still pretty great. Got to Skype the family for sure and that was AWESOME. We spoke for a good long time and caught up. It´s crazy that this is my last Christmas in the mission that just passed. Crazy how time flies. 

So our day went a bit like this. We had a `district meeting`/party business that morning for fun. Then after that we had 2 lunches it eat, and almost died too. We ate SSSOOO much! My stomach still really hasn´t recovered. All they eat here when it´s a holiday is Barbecue too, so it was just a tone of meat. I gained a kilo or two I´m pretty sure. It was pretty great :). After all that we went to a recent convert´s house and I helped/taught her how to make an American apple pie, which turned out pretty good but I didn´t use enough sugar, so they might think it´s pretty lame, ha ha. We also watched Joseph Smith: Prophet of the Restoration with her which was pretty cool to see in Portuguese. Finally we called home and talked for a bit which was pretty great :). 

The days since have been pretty much dead. Nobody really wants to talk to us too much, ha ha. 

Um, since I´m kinda lacking on material to write here I guess I´ll leave a little advise for all you future missionaries out there. This is really the first time I´ve been feeling ´trunkie` on my mission after a phone call home. Trunkie is a slang word we use here to mean that you think about home a lot and don´t feel like working. You know how to fix that? JUST GET BACK TO WORK. Pull a Nike and Just Do It. Really there is no secret pill or trick to it, just do it. 

I guess it´s also the time of year we all make new goals and stuff so I want to throw my two cents in on this too. I´ll be plagiarizing some talks here, so get ready for a bit of citations. The first thing we need to do is stop looking back. Elder Holland has a cool talk about his called ´Remebmer Lot´s Wife` about Luke 11:35 (I think) where Christ reminds us of exactly that. If we are always looking back we will never leave the past, never improve, basically get stuck. We need to have faith, which is always pointed to the future. Faith, in God that he has a much better future planned for us than the present and faith in ourselves to keep pressing forward. 

Elder Ballard also gave an awesome discourse on goals that I´m always quoting called `Do Things that are important` (or something along those lines). He teaches that if we want to get anywhere in life, we need goals. On top of that we need to COMPLETE our goals. Pres. Weidman also taught me a lot about this. That really if we want to get anywhere in life there´s only one thing we really need to be good at: fulfilling our goals. The rest will come, all we need to do is be able to set our mind to something and get it done and then we can literally do and become anything we want. 

Look up them talks, you´ll learn something. 

Hope you all have a good New Years and always remember, God loves you and thing can only get better :). 

-Um on exército de Deus

Elder Teela