Week 73-- Elder, just get home after the interview

Well, another week came and went pretty fast. It´s been pretty great and there´s really more than I can tell that happened, as always, ha ha. I´ll try to be fast and tell it all like usual though. I think I´ll be a bit briefer this these ones though. 

So Tuesday we went to the temple with some sisters in our district which was fun. Especially for them when it started pouring and none of us brought our umbrellas. My comp was making a video and started doing a commentary and said    `It´s too late for their make-up.... hope is lost´, ha ha. 

Thursday was fun because we had district meeting and the sisters brought some brownies that were to die for. I almost did because I ate too many of them, ha ha. After that we went on exchanges with my good bud Elder Gomez. We bro´d it up all day and had lunch with a recent convert which was AWESOME and then we went and lit the world on fire. We spent 2 hours teaching and finding I think and we found 11 new investigators! 

That night we also had English class which was fun as usual. The other Elders basically just let me teach and I went to it. But this kinda annoying guy showed up and everyone got mad at him in the class because he kept asking questions that had nothing to do with the class and repeating them sometimes 10 times before I could answer, which got old fast. It was funny though because he kept calling me ´pastor´ which we all got some good laughs out of. 

Friday and Saturday we spent literally all the days at interview. It was super cool because the whole district baptized this week!  It was fun traveling but it kinda wasted all our money.... good thing I had a reserve fund! Ha ha! But really it was cool. One interview we showed up at 8 o´clock at night and she said she didn´t want to be baptized but after a bit we started bearing tons of testimony and the spirit touched her strong. She told us ´I don´t know what happened but suddenly everything I was thinking just... clicked and changed...´ it was SO cool! She was interviewed and we ended up getting a ride home at around 11 at night from her not-so-boyfriend (it´s complicated). The spirit was SO strong and when we called President he just said ´Elder, just get home after the interview, have a good night´ 

Oh and Sunday I played the organ.... well, I programed it and sat there touching the keys in time like I needed to but the chorister had other ideas..... She kept pausing and changing the time and slowing down and speeding up, ha ha. It turned out okay until the last hymn which kind of just burned and died, ha ha. 

We also had yet another baptism this week! That makes this 3 weeks straight! And 5 for the ward! It´s pretty awesome to see the Lord in the work and the miracles that are happening here! 

For my little final thought I was thinking this week of a quote I heard once from Winston Churchill, who was okay for a Brit, ha ha. He said this: ´Never give in, never give in, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.´ That is exactly how we should be. Never, Never, Never give in. We may feel weak, we may even look weak and the forces of evil in this world may be far greater than us, but we had the All Mighty on our side, we cannot fail. So keep your head up and ´keep on keepin´ on´ as my mom always says. 

Have a good week! 

-Um no exército de Deus

Elder Teela

Week 72-- Time is going so fast!

Bah, I´m almost done with my Sister mission! Time is going fast so I´mma try my best to keep everyone updated on everything. It´s getting harder to keep up but I´ll try :) 

So you know how people tell you you get more tired the longer you are on the mission. About 3 or 4 months ago I didn´t really believe it but now... I almost fell asleep in a few lessons, ha ha. I think it´s mostly the heat down here. It really suck the energy out of you like crazy, but on the bright side I´m not burning anymore..... or maybe I´m just permanently burnt now.... Not too sure. 

Starting from last Monday we WRECKED some poor kids at basket ball, ha ha. They all just kinda gave up which was a bit sad but still satisfying in a sick way, ha ha. That sounds really messed up I know but it was a good time :). 

We had an awesome FHE with a returning less-active family and we played that whole game where everyone has a card on their head and they need to guess who they are. Some poor little girl was very stressed out and finally just looked at her card..... But didn´t know how to read it, ha ha. The poor thing almost broke down but we helped her out and she was much happier. 

We´ve been working with this girl Natalia all week which has been awesome! She just appeared in church last Sunday and now she´s baptized! She was SO prepared she even walks to church on her own every week! It´s pretty legit. We´ve also been working with the grandsons of one of our recent converts and both of them have now been baptized. One openly told us even that he didn´t want to be this weekend but when the interview happened just actually asked to be baptized this week! I had the privilege to be the one to baptize them both too :). 

We also received a bunch of referrals from a family of 2 returned missionaries and that was exciting. We hopped on the bus last week and went there to contact them all but it turned out to be more of a task than we thought. Turns out the are has a ton of dogs that like the taste of missionary. I´m used to seeing plenty of dogs on the streets around here and all but most of them don´t even bark and if they give you trouble you just act a like you´re gonna throw a rock at them and they run away. This time we actually ended up throwing some rocks and Elder Sanches ran away from one, ha ha. That was sure something new. 

We also passed some members for lunch and I asked how they were. They said they were sad and when I asked why turns out their stupid dogs attacked a porcupine! One of the beasties took a bit full of the needles and swallowed one the got to it´s heart and it died.... I did my best and managed not to laugh at the moment. 

So I´m running out of time so I´ll leave you with a little thought here. Sometime we need to take a little break in live and just left ourselves laugh or cry or whatever a bit. Whether it´s a loss in a hard game or constant stress we should all let ourselves relax a bit. Even God rested one day out of 7, so we should too! It´s better than letting it build up and exploding on the ones we love, right? 

Anyway, that´s my sh-peel, have a good week everyone! 

-Elder Teela

 

Week 71-- Happy 20th Birthday

First off, thank you to everyone who sent in birthday wishes! It was really fun to see an inbox FULL if all of them, ha ha. My comp thinks I'm the most loved missionary on earth right now and I about feel that way :). Thank you one and all! 

So this week I got an unexpected visit from Elder Francom for P-day. He was with a missionary finishing his mission and this was an old area of his so we all get together for the day. We mostly just played sports together all day.

So this week was great. We started off the week with no real prospective baptisms and ended the week with a baptism every week this month (minus last week)! It's pretty great. We found out a long time baptismal date came back to town this week so he was baptized yesterday. His name is Rodrygo and he's pretty great. He's the grandson of another one of our recent converts and was pretty on fire since we first met him, despite the fact he's only 14! Gotta love how God prepares his children. We just showed up Wednesday and he was there, ha ha. 

It's also been raining a lot here.... I mean like a lot. It pretty much went like this for 3 or 4 days straight: The hottest days I´ve ever spent on my mission an then around 3 or 4 o'clock the rain just exploded on top of us. 

We usually had about half an hour of warning but we'd go into a lesson and get out of it just in time to run a bit and ended up taking on a bunch of rain before we made it to some shelter. We pretty much just went home to get out of our wet clothes those days. Oh and we lost power for about 20 hours which was fun. We passed the night in candle light which was pretty cool actually. 

We spent my birthday like normal but passed by a recent convert's home and she made us an AWESOME cake. It was a fun little get together. I also made us an apple pie in the morning that turned out just great. Sister Wright (mission president's wife) called too to wish me happy birthday :). 

Um, not a whole lot more to really report. The work is good and we are managing to get the mission standards in spite of cutting plenty of time out of out days because of the rain. Like I said, we have a ton of baptisms lined up so it should be some good weeks to come. 

I guess I want to talk about limits. Sometimes God pushes ours, not because He doesn't love us but because He knows that we can be much better than we are. I heard a story I heard once from C.S Lewis: 

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

I love that message there and I think we all have plenty to work on and learn there. Stretch yourself, it's how we grow and fulfill God's plan for us

Hope you all have a great week! 

Um no exército de Deus

-Elder Teela

Week 70-- the holidays killed our work

So this week was actually not all that great to be honest. Transfers, holidays really killed our work but we had some fun too. Like I said last week was transfers so I got my a new Colombian friend here by the name of Elder Sánchez. He does speak a little English and we are teaching him a bit but really we only have the Portuguese in common, so that´s fun. He speaks Spanish of course so sometime he hits me with a word in Spanish and asks if I know the word in Portuguese (which they´re usually really similar) and it´s fun to guess. He´s DL and I´m senior which I´m not entirely sure how that works but it does. In the other mission usually the DL is also senior so it interesting to see that difference. 

For New years we pretty much did the same at you guys do in the states. We just stayed at a members home until 10:30 (we had permission) and them went home and finished up there with just us 4. But the problem was that when we tried to go home we found out that their car stopped working! Wooohoo! We ended up taking a taxi and actually getting home around 11:30 and were getting ready to go to bed when the New year hit. Tons of fireworks and loud music in our normally quiet neighborhood were interesting. It´s funny how tired you are at midnight when you are used to staying up till 10:30 and then knocking out like you took a hit from Rocky. We were all SO out of it, ha ha. 

Um, also Saturday we had a cool lunch with our 2 sets of Elders and 2 sets of Sisters. There is a family that literally lives on the boarder of our 2 wards so we all ate together. We actually didn´t know they´d be there either but it was fun none the less. It was something like 16 or 17 people in a house that is only 3 or 4 rooms. It was pretty fun :). 

To be honest the work, like I said, was pretty dead this week. Out numbers were about half of our average so that was pretty annoying. We had some pretty good days still but not really enough to get to our goals. I was pretty down about it yesterday but it should all be a lot better next week. We´re gonna just set the place on fire with contacting and spiritual-ness. I guess you could say that´s my message this week. I´ve gotten some emails from some of you that have really made me sad, nothing you´ve done but just the hard things that really happen to good people in this life. It makes my heart sick and sometimes I feel like a total baby almost crying in an Internet cafe-thing. Life just sucks sometimes. That´s the end of it. But the good part is that this isn´t really our life, you could say. This is a blink in the scope of eternity. If you think about it, we lived with God before this life for heaven knows how long. Then, after this we´ll live with Him again FOREVER. Sometimes it feels like the current trials are too much but when we really look back it won´t feel like hardly anything because it will feel like mere seconds. That and we have the knowledge that ´the faithful will know that every tear today will eventually be returned a hundredfold with tears of rejoicing and gratitude.´ As Joseph B. Wirthlin taught. Go on, keep your head high and know that you are destined to be a king/queen in the eternities, never to know sorrow again. 

Everyone have a great year and great week! 

-Elder Teela 

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 

Week 68-- #Heisthegift

HoHoHoHoHoHo! 

How´s everyone doing? Merry Christmas everyone! Hope it´s all great there and that at least some of you have a white Christmas because I sure as heck won´t be. It´s getting to the hottest part of the year here, about 90 everyday... So it might rain like crazy but it isn´t going to snow, ha ha. 

So this week has been pretty normal, well, not really, but it felt normal. So this guy showed up to church last week and told us that he just wanted to look into the church and well... HE WAS BAPTIZED SUNDAY! How cool is that?! Literally a week, two times to church and he was ready to be baptized! He was super prepared by God too, he said that he had been talking to his girlfriend about the church for a bit of time now but never really looked at it too much until now and he loves it. He did all the readings we asked him to and prayed and got his answers and knew that it was God. His name is Micom, he´s about 26 and pretty jacked. Such a cool miracle! 

Let´s see, we also had pretty major rain this week. I took a video but it´s too big to send. It rains pretty hardcore out here, ha ha. 

Oh, so a funny story real quick. It was about 9:45 I think, after hours on the mission. We were playing some cards and laughing about something or another and then Elder Kinney made a joke while Elder Jasperson was taking a big drink of his water. Normally this would only result in a bit of coughing and stuff but after coughing for about 45 seconds he ran into the bathroom, which made us all laugh harder. We thought he was just in the bathroom coughing but he came back in the room and said `Yeah, I just threw up there`. Which of course sounded another round of near-death by laughing. It was pretty funny. 

So, sorry but I´m gonna make this one short. Hope you all have a great Christmas and remember why we have it in the first place. Keep the CHRIST in CHRISTmas. #Heisthegift. 

-Um no exército de Deus

Elder Teela

Week 67-- we woke up, were a bit freaked out, laughed a bit and then fell back asleep

Boa tarde todo mundo!

(Good afternoon everybody) 

At least I think it´ll be afternoon when most of you get this... time zones make it hard to think of these things, ha ha (If you be in another country you know what I´m talking about). Anyway this week was better than worse you could say, we got some hammocks that are pretty legit but we can´t use them for now because we have no way to hang them.... but I will one day! It is a goal in my mission to sleep in one for at least a transfer (6 weeks). I think most people don´t have goals like that but ´tou nem ai (I don´t care), this is Brasil, ha ha. 

So had some funny little mis-haps this week. We were in district meeting and Elder Kinny wanted us to makes some lines for a game, but instead of saying lines (desfilas, which actually means parades) he was saying that he wanted ten daughters (dez filhas). I know that it looks different but really they almost sound the same. We spent about 5 mins trying to help him get it right and laughing and finally he got it right but then went right back to saying wrong. He gets it now.... I think.

Also we had some eventful nights. We were all sleeping Friday when one of our weak beds broke. We had a bunk bed on one side and a single on the other with me and Elder Kinney on the ground with mattresses in the middle. The single collapsed in the middle of the night and broke so he joined us on the ground. The other Elder sleeps on top of the bunk beds so on one really uses the one below. For some reason he wanted  to put the mattress from the lower bunk under his so that he and 2 mattresses. Not sure why, but he did. Anyway, we took it out and gave it to him and the other Elder ascended and got in bed, but the bunk started swaying a ton and creaking when he got up there, so we all thought it would fall, so you can guess the result. It fell around 4:30 in the morning. I woke up to here just this *creek creek creek.... CCCRRREEEEEEEEKKKK* andBOOM!  (yeah, this warrants change of text) That bed fell almost exactly in front of the other and shattered the one on bottom into pieces. We all then woke up and were a bit freaked out, laughed a bit and then fell back asleep. We were all fine, just the bed was busted. 

So on a bit more spiritual side both of the people who were baptized last week were confirmed which was awesome. We weren´t sure the 12-year-old would make it because he would be in another city with his dad but they both hopped on the train and surprised us at the front of the church just before classes started. His dad isn´t a member and we don´t really know if he is interested but this is the second week in a row he´s come to church for more than 1 hour, so we think he might have some potential there. He just lives in another city so we´ll have to pass him off. When we confirmed the 2 of them I got to confirm the son but I´m pretty sure that other than the required words it made little to no sense in Portuguese, ha ha. What can I say? It´s the second blessing I´ve given in the language, so there´s still a bit of a learning curve. 

We went on exchanges too which was pretty fun. I got to know an Elder Gomez a bit better. He´s pretty awesome, we have identical personalities, so we are pretty much bros. We went to the home of their baptismal dates that they had there, 3 kids in a family that wasn´t completely baptized yet, and I guess I was the first American they knew, ha ha. They were all a bit blown away and wanted to find me on Facebook, ha ha. People here just seem to love us, ha ha. 

We also gave an American history thing Friday night at an English school a member works at. It was pretty chill and the kids liked it. It was fun and we got a mountain of contacts, so that was pretty sweet. 

So to be spiritual this week I´ll talk a little about the refiner´s fire. We were teaching this woman who we sadly need to drop now. She swore earlier that she would be baptized but the road to repentance proved a little harder than she thought. A lot of people today look for a quick easy fix `easy salvation` you could say. But wanting that is overlooking the entire point of why we are here. To GROW. If salvation were easy and God just saved us with a snap of the his fingers then we wouldn´t change at all. Many people focus on the fact that the atonement is paid and forget that it was actually an investment. The garden, the cross and the tomb were just the start of everything, not the end. We still need to grow and change and USE the atonement that Christ gave us. That´s why we can´t just sit back and be saved, we need to be a part of the process. Yes, we can´t really save ourselves through our works, but by our works we can become more like God and more ready for the life to come. But like iron that doesn´t bend unless heated and beaten we must endure the pain to get any gain, so changing hurts. I mean it really hurts. I´ve gone through a few less-than-comfortable changes in my life and I look forward to more because I know that I am happier and stronger because of it, that God has big plans in store for me. 

That´s about it for this week, hope you all have a good one! 

-Um no exército de Deus

Elder Teela