March 5, 2011

Wow!!! The quilt square looks really pretty! How long did it take you? It seems like it was a long time. Hopefully you will get faster at it as you go. So I read last week that Tyler got into BYU! Woo Hoo!! Congratulations Tyler!! That’s awesome! You will have to let me know what you decide.

This week was a monumental week for me. I taught my very first lesson all by myself. It was very short because I don’t know how to say very much but it was still pretty good if I do say so myself. I taught Natália and her daughter Talita (who were baptized last week) about enduring to the end. We read together the end of 2 Nephi 31 and talked about how we can apply what it said in their lives. I was a little nervous before we started but it turned out not to be too hard.

Here in Brazil the important meal of the day is lunch. Every day we have lunch at a different member’s house. On Thursday this week we were walking to lunch and decided to take a different street than we usually do. While we were walking a guy on a motorcycle stopped by us and started talking. I couldn’t understand a single word he said because he had a helmet that covered his mouth, but Sister Borges explained after what he said. He is a less-active member who got baptized with his family last year on the other side of Sobral. They moved to a house that is just a couple streets away from us and didn’t know where or when the ward over here met so they haven’t had a chance to go to church for a long time. We gave him the address and times for our ward and invited him to come. Later that day we went to his house and talked with his wife and 3 kids. The wife said that she missed going to church and wanted to start going again. When she told her 7 and 5 year old boys that they are going to go to church they got super excited and started running around the house shouting we are going to church! We are going to church!! I wish everyone was as excited about church as these 2 kids were.

It is amazing to me how the simplest decisions that you don’t think matter can make such a huge difference. What if we had not changed up our routine that one day? It would have taken a lot longer to find these members again. We might have never found them. One of the things that I love most about being on a mission is having the opportunity to see the Spirit work in my life and being able to see it work in the lives of those around me.