hey everyone! how are you all doing this fine week! i hope you are all doing well after your long trips and everything! it was probably pretty fun to see the others this week and to see new places. i am excited to go on a roadtrip to arizona sometime! (i probably wont ever go to reno because you guys will be done by school by then). That will be fun. i hope you all had a great time though! everything is going pretty well here. we actually have people that are progressing now so i am pretty excited about that! that has been a problem this last transfer. but now we just got to get them to progress a little bit quicker! life is so much easier with a teaching pool! when there are people progressing, you always have someone to teach (and baptize), members are more excited to go on visits with you, and you get way more referrels and referrels are tons better than people we talk to in
the street. so we are getting there now! the zone is also going very well. we have got the best missionaries here. they are so good! our zone has half as many missionaries than the other zones but we have more baptisms! isnt that sweet! i am pretty happy with their work. there is just one area that is having hard times. that is just because they dont have a cell phone. so we cant talk to them to see if they are working and neither can their district leader. that is pretty annoying but hopefully will change tomorrow! Tomorrow will be our multi- zone conference! Elder Soares is going to be there! He is a 70! I am excited. he is going to interview a lot of missionaries he said. he has like 3 hours set aside to interview missionaries tomorrow. i hope he doesnt tell me that i am the worst missionary ever and that i need to learn how to work ha. i dont think i will! have i told you guys that there will be an apostle here in january? the mission doesnt know yet though! we dont know which will come yet! i am excited! what a blessing! this week went alright in our area. we only had 4 people at church though. we have some elect people now i think. first of all we are teaching maria jose. she is a member's fiance. her fiance, marcos, asked us to go teach her. we ate lunch and they gave us shoe polish and even before teaching they said that we need to baptize her so they can get married in the temple in a year from now. i think we can do that ha. she is an older lady, like dad's age...(haha dad is an older person now jk). she would be baptized this sunday but she went on a trip this last week so we havent been able to teach her. we also were
walking to teach another person and a lady named celia called out elder. elder bavender talked to her and she said lots of missionaries have passed by her house. she was just about baptized like 10 years ago. we taught her and she lives with her grandkids and adopted daughter. she has a hard life now. she has a daughter that uses drugs(the mother of these kids). and cuz celia helps her daughter to live still, the rest of her family left her. we just left a quick message about how the church will bless her grandkids so they dont enter that same path that their mom did. she started crying and said it was true. she is elect too! but that is pretty much what is going on here in brazil. i am learning tons. thanks for everything! you guys are the best! love you!
love,
elder long
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
October 6, 2010
hey family! how are you guys doing? this week is going pretty well. i am pretty happy with everything. we had our district meeting yesterday and everyone is really happy and motivated and i really was surprised by the missionaries that "arent supposed to be the greatest missionaries here." they really are working well and our zone had the most baptisms of all the zones and we will baptize at least 8 more this week too! things are going great. that one missionary was transfered, that one that left his shirt untucked when we got here. so we got a new missionary and one less difficulty. i really am doing good now. i was a little bit frustrated with everything but now it is all good! the missionaries really trust in me now and we have a lot of union. now we just got to keep the excitement and the desire to work with us the whole day!
conference was great! i wasnt in botucatu the whole weekend. that was tough because i wasnt able to help take our investigators to watch conference. that is really crappy. but because i was in Jaú, i was able to watch via satelite instead of through the internet which is way better. haha alright i really did end up watching most of it through the internet because they were watching in portuguese of course and elder nothum wanted to watch in english. so we ended up watchin on the computer. it was really good. they talked a lot about following the prophet and about gratitude. i thought that for sure the prophet would say something extraordinary for us to do. and i was ready to do whatever he said. but turns out he didnt say anything new.
he looked really sad though. that was too bad. i felt like we need to be better people cuz we are making the prophet sad. i really liked that first declaration president monson made about missionary work. haha we actually used that as a lunch message in Jaú. there is a girl there that is dating a guy from my branch. he is at the age to go on a mission but this girl doesnt let him go because she says, if you go i wont wait for you. so we played this part for her and her family and she said, " do you think he heard this too?" hopefully that makes him think about going on a mish! but conference was pretty great. elder holland was pretty powerful as he thanked us for everything. i have got conference to listen o now. so i am really excited. i already put
it on my ipod!
monday, we had a meeting at president tanner's house. it was great as always. we learned tons. and it was decided that we need to give a little bit more responsibility to the district leaders. there were some zone leaders that were trying to do everything. i always gave responsibility to my district leaders. that is what has made all of the zone leaders now too. i have been blessed with some great district leaders in our zones. but the only difference now is that i dont have to teach anything in the district meetings. i just talk about the president's message. it is so great! that took off a lot of stress and now i can study other stuff during the week. monday was tough because we caught the bus at 6 to campinas and then we caught the bus returning to botucatu at 6 that night. that is an 8 hour ride (not quite the distance as IF to Arizona) but it was still pretty rough. then the assistant who has never talked to me in his life called me to ask me how the week was going and to demand results and to ask why i was tired. ha that made me a little upset because we werent able to do any work in our area. but i will just remember to not do something like that with our zone. but overall, things are going well. we found lots of incomplete families that we are teaching right now. it is going to be awesome to reactivate all these families and baptize the rest of the family in the process. we are still trying to get a real good teaching pool together though. that will come though!
well i love you all! thanks for everything you do!
love,
elder long
conference was great! i wasnt in botucatu the whole weekend. that was tough because i wasnt able to help take our investigators to watch conference. that is really crappy. but because i was in Jaú, i was able to watch via satelite instead of through the internet which is way better. haha alright i really did end up watching most of it through the internet because they were watching in portuguese of course and elder nothum wanted to watch in english. so we ended up watchin on the computer. it was really good. they talked a lot about following the prophet and about gratitude. i thought that for sure the prophet would say something extraordinary for us to do. and i was ready to do whatever he said. but turns out he didnt say anything new.
he looked really sad though. that was too bad. i felt like we need to be better people cuz we are making the prophet sad. i really liked that first declaration president monson made about missionary work. haha we actually used that as a lunch message in Jaú. there is a girl there that is dating a guy from my branch. he is at the age to go on a mission but this girl doesnt let him go because she says, if you go i wont wait for you. so we played this part for her and her family and she said, " do you think he heard this too?" hopefully that makes him think about going on a mish! but conference was pretty great. elder holland was pretty powerful as he thanked us for everything. i have got conference to listen o now. so i am really excited. i already put
it on my ipod!
monday, we had a meeting at president tanner's house. it was great as always. we learned tons. and it was decided that we need to give a little bit more responsibility to the district leaders. there were some zone leaders that were trying to do everything. i always gave responsibility to my district leaders. that is what has made all of the zone leaders now too. i have been blessed with some great district leaders in our zones. but the only difference now is that i dont have to teach anything in the district meetings. i just talk about the president's message. it is so great! that took off a lot of stress and now i can study other stuff during the week. monday was tough because we caught the bus at 6 to campinas and then we caught the bus returning to botucatu at 6 that night. that is an 8 hour ride (not quite the distance as IF to Arizona) but it was still pretty rough. then the assistant who has never talked to me in his life called me to ask me how the week was going and to demand results and to ask why i was tired. ha that made me a little upset because we werent able to do any work in our area. but i will just remember to not do something like that with our zone. but overall, things are going well. we found lots of incomplete families that we are teaching right now. it is going to be awesome to reactivate all these families and baptize the rest of the family in the process. we are still trying to get a real good teaching pool together though. that will come though!
well i love you all! thanks for everything you do!
love,
elder long
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)