Keeping on...

I gave my first talk in Portuguese this Sunday. The bishop called up sunday night and asked if we could give talks, so of course we had to say yes. It was only 10 minutes so it wasn´t too long. I talked about the atonement and I only wrote down about 3 sentences for notes before I spoke, and I ended up speaking longer than I should have so the bishopric started tapping my shoes to let me know to wrap it up. I didn´t think it was too shabby if I do say so myself. It´s interesting whenever a missionary gets called to give a talk, you really have only to choose between two different topics: 1. call the members to missionary work to help you out, (which I chose) or 2. call everybody to repentance, REPENT YOU SINNERS!! THIS IS THE WORST WARD I`VE EVER SEEN!!! STRAIGHTEN UP!! I think I´ll leave the second choice until next time. I left my notes at home, so if you want to read what I said it´ll have to wait until next week.

Things are going alright here, me and my companion get along better than I have with the other ones. But it´s definitely frustrating when your new companion doesn´t care about the investigators the way you do. I don´t want to sound like a fault-finder with all my companions, I like serving with him, but if we´re gonna baptize we have to focus on the right people. Just a bit frustrating. It doesn´t bug me if someone´s heart isn´t in the work, as long as you DO the work and have results. It´s like what President Tobias said: *It doesn´t matter to why you came out on the mission. It matters why you STAY on the mission*

But i´m sure we´ll get around that, we´ve got a new whiteboard in our house now so we can plan out more visually our strategies and battle plans for baptizing the world. And we´ve got a few people lined up already, and we´ve got 6 weeks to do it. So pretty much if we don´t baptize at least some of the 7 people we have listed, it´ll be pretty embarrassing.

I´m glad you liked the pictures, haha. There have been many pretty fun days, and some others where you wake up, or go to bed saying *oh please, just kill me now, TAKE ME SWEET HEAVEN!!* or something like that.

Also, if anybody at home is complaining about the milk there, smack em a few times and tell them what we have down here. Our milk comes in boxes, and it tastes so bad that you HAVE to drink it as chocolate milk or it just makes you shudder. And this milk is mutant or something, because they sell it on the shelf, not in a fridge, and you can keep in on the shelf, or fridge forever and it´ll never go bad.... until you open it, and then you only have 2 days to drink it all before it goes rotten. yeah.

ah ok ok, confession time, I may or may not have watched the last 15 minutes of Night at the Museum 2 at a member´s house while waiting for lunch. But the weird thing is that it was all in Portuguese and I understood most of it and was laughing just as hard as if it were in English. mmhmmm. "Check out the gun-show goin on over here, Boom, Boom, Firepower!"

So yeah, I´m pretty sure that´s about it for now. We get to use the internet here for free every week because the guy here is our friend and really likes us. Oh yeah, thanks to me.

Thanks for shedding some light on how Joseph Smith was praying to know which church to JOIN, never realized that. I´ll have to apply that somewhere. And thank you for the Preisthood line of authority, awesome.

Enjoy the 4th of July, it feels like it´s the 4th every day down here whenever Brazil is playing (and winning) in the world cup. Spaced out of course by eerie silence when nobody is out on the streets.

Good luck to Josh in Canada. :)

Love ya´ll, Miss ya´ll

*It is my belief that if we were good people in this life, and lived well, God would allow us to be pirates*

Elder Webber