November 18, 2009 letter

November 18, 2009

Well, everything is good here in Rio Claro. I will tell you about my jam-packed week. I had just finished this letter up and then I lost it. So I will type it up real quick now. Ha-ha awesome! So last pday after email and going to the center of town. I played basketball. It started to rain so we just shot around in the rain. No one showed up and as we were leaving a brother in the ward showed up so we played around the world. I barely squeeked out a win ha. Then it stopped raining and a kid from the ward that has never played basketball showed up so we played 2 on 2. I was on his team. We won too. He stood on the 3 line and just watched. The times when he had the ball he threw it away. But it was good to play. Felt good, but I was pretty tired afterwards. This Sunday that kid asked me to sign his shoes. Ha but I haven’t yet. We also played ping pong. That was fun. On Thursday we had a multi zone conference. It was really good and president talked a lot about personal revelation. He said that he had been praying that some missionaries receive dreams as revelations. I had three! I haven’t dreamed at all in my mission and I had three that I feel were revelatory. On Sunday I gave a talk on the atonement and talked for 10 minutes. I felt I did all right. I found out, though, that I need to work on my accent a lot! Ha I will start working on that. on Monday we had family night with Irmão Sergio and his family. It was pretty good. Their family is awesome. The message given was about having joy in the journey. Pretty good. Yesterday was our zone meeting and I was pretty excited to talk to someone from Idaho. Did I tell you that Elder Murri is in my zone? he is a lot like Eric, too ha. But maybe that sounded a little trunky, ha. But I wasn’t expecting it, but another Idahoan showed up at our zone meeting. He is from Iona, too! Chad was involved in an emergency transfer and now he is in my zone. So I will see him quite a bit.

Well, I will hurry and tell you about who we are teaching! Well, we are teaching a man named José Dias and his wife and 3 daughters. They have been investigating for quite a while. Yesterday we went there with a pretty good lesson to teach to mark their baptisms for next week. The mom wasn’t there so we decided to wait. We left a message with them and it was just a scripture, but it was really good. And they started asking questions and stuff. He said he only had one doubt and we solved that so we will see how the lesson goes today. We are teaching a man named Gleides. He is a little strange and is worried that his church will kill him for being baptized. His baptism will be the 28th. We are teaching Diani and Cristina. They both want to be baptized this Sunday. We just need to talk to their dad to make sure they can. We are teaching two children of a member that will be baptized this Sunday as well. Other then that we have Luciano and Janice. They are just waiting for papers so they can get married. Janice works Sundays so doesn’t get to go to church. She has been having doubts lately. Elder Paillo left a message and I wasn’t paying attention haha. he looked at me to bare testimony and I didn’t even know what he had talked about. I just told her that tribulations always show that there will be blessings right afterwards. I was just talking and don’t remember what I said. But she said that’s exactly what she needed. Pretty awesome!

Well, Jay Dee sounds pretty busy as the secretary. I couldn’t handle that. Especially in a different language. Mom, maybe you could talk to the parents of my other friends like Jon and Tyson so I can get their emails too. And dad, the zip code that you usually use is old so 13010-215 would be better and faster. And I was wondering if maybe someone could send me grandpa’s life history. And some maple contract in the next package. Thanks Tons! Love you all!!

Love,

Elder Long