24 Oct entry

This week had its ups and downs. The week started out with us doing splits. I teamed up with Elder A. Sousa to do some teaching and I got to meet some of his investigators. We were held up at one investigator´s house, because his brother (who had been drinking) insisted that we have something to eat. He sent his brother out to buy us coke, but then he found that we don´t drink coke (after he had already bought it), so he sent his brother out again to buy us other soda.

One exciting thing that happened was that we had a branch cake/pie baking competition and our investigators were the judges. Elder Swenson and I made a pie thingy, but something went wrong and it became ice cream and then soup, but it was still delicious.

One disapointing thing was that we found almost no one new to teach. We were doing a lot of tracting, but after hearing the message of the restoration no one wanted to change, which is the most frustrating part of missionary work.

When Sunday came around, we went to go get all of our investigators to go to church, but no one was home, other than this really awesome kid, Luciano. It turns out that he knows the branch president´s son. We have his baptism marked for the 12th.

Elder Swenson likes walking more than taking the bus, so last night we walked an hour and a half to an appointment and then another hour and a little bit home, but at least today is P-day.

With all the things that happened this week it means that miracles are around the corner.

Love,
Elder David Short

pics cont.

A test of faith

Well my dear family,
We went into this last week feeling really awesome about our work. The week before we had found a lot of awesome new people and we were making plans as to what our next move was.
The zone leaders came down Tuesday night, unexpectedly, to have exchanges. I got to work Elder Pires, from my first district in Anapolis. On Wednesday we worked in trios and Elder Swenson and I teamed up with Elder Boyne,
the other zone leader. I always feels that I learn a lot during exchanges, but that the work seems to slow down.
Thursday we met with little success, and again on Friday, but then Saturday arrived!
Saturday we were tracting out a street and we were finding a lot of soft people who didin´t want to keep commitments. After a horrible lesson, where the person just wanted to challenge us on everything, I turned to Elder Swenson and said:
Me: This is going to be awesome!
E. Swenson: What?
Me: All our lessons today have been horrible, so you know what that means.
E. Swenson: Sure do.....
Me: It means that we´re getting tested to see if we´re worthy of the blessings God wants to send us, so we´re going to find someone awesome today.
That night we taught a family of four that accepted all the commitments and a baptismal date. Now I just hope that I don´t get transferred before they get baptized. Sunday night we found two more families that accepted baptism. Milagres sao reais quando voce cre!
This last week we also started to teach two kids English.
With love,
Elder David Short

pics:
The caju fruit
Me eating the caju fruit
A stick bug that I found in our house
Me eating star fruit

pics

pics

more pics

Training (Oct 3rd)

So this week, after three days of nail biting we finally had transfers. Elder Rowberry and Elder Brelaz were transferred to Goiânia and I got to stay in Itumbiara for a little longer. My new companion is Elder Swenson, who was in my first district in Anâpolis. He´s got a lot more time on the mission than me, so I´m learning a lot of cool teaching techniques. He´s the Elder who tricked me into saying that the food was weird. He´s pretty awesome. He´s a trekkie, and likes to make angry faces, so we get along just fine. I also found out that he likes Calvin and Hobbes and Lord of the Rings, so we´re officially the nerdy companionship in the district.

General conference was amazing. We watched it at the chapel (we still haven´t found a new location yet) on a projector. It was the first time that I watched conference in Portuguese, and it wasn´t the same. The translators don´t carry over the characterization in their voices, so the listening was a little bland, but Elder Swenson and I were able to download the audio file afterwards. Now I´m getting a feel for the true awesomeness of this conference. I was a little confused at not hearing any plane stories, or mention of the lack of plane stories this conference, but Elder Uchtdorf´s talk was awesome all the same. I really want the conference ensign now to study everything.

Well to say the least I was spiritually uplifted this week.
Love,
Elder David Short

Training ... Continued

This last week would have been transfers, but our mission president put it off until after the last Sunday of the month, because he didn´t want to interrupt any last minute baptisms. So we might be getting our transfer calls tonight. I´m hoping that I stay in Itumbiara for a little longer, but I´ll be happy with whatever the Lord decides.
We have been commissioned to find a new building to rent as our new chapel, but it´s really difficult to find a building affordable, well centralized in the city, with various classrooms, area for a baptismal font, and one big room that can fit 100 people. We continue the search.
There are two pretty cool occurrences that occurred this week. The first miracle we witnessed happened on Wednesday. We trying to contact some people and we passed by the house of someone we had previously tried to teach, about two months ago, but she said that she was an atheist and that if God existed that she wouldn´t be going through so many hardships in her life. She had lost her business (which had over three hundred employees), she had lost her car and was preparing to lose her house. She told us that listening to our message wouldn´t make a difference, but she accepted to read the pamphlet on the restoration. So this week I felt prompted to see how she was doing. We knocked on her door (we actually clapped at the gate) and she came out and told us how her life was turning around. She had read the pamphlet, but didn´t know where the church was, and that she had been looking for us. We set up an appointment to teach her at her office building the next day. She wasn´t in when we stopped by, but we slid the address of the church under her door. The story hasn´t ended yet, so hopefully I´ll be sharing the rest of the happy ending next week.
Yesterday we also had a pretty spiritual experience. We went to the hospital to give a member´s husband´s dad a blessing, but the nurse office lady person said that we could only visit one at a time. As a missionary, where you can´t be alone, it was a difficult situation. We were able to convince the lady to let us both go, but I´d have to wait outside the door. When we got to the door, the lady who gave us our protective hospital gowns said that her brother was a member in another city and that she didn´t have a problem with us both going. After our visit, the son said that before his dad hadn´t been able to talk yet, but that after the blessing he was able to converse normally.

Ran out of time so
Love,
Elder David Short

Cont:

 For the record I´d like the jury and counsel to know that I wasn´t the one holding the snake. That was actually my second encounter with a coral snake. The first encounter was outside our house in Uberlândia.

  I´m sad to report that I didn´t have any exciting encounters with animals this week, just the normal dogs and a couple owls that are always at the soccer field.

I did have quite the interesting experience when I went on splits with Elder Pimentel. We were walking on the sidewalk, on the way to a lesson, when the ground gave out from beneath us. We barely noticed and kept walking, but when we looked back we saw that we had made a 3ftx4.5ftx1ft hole. It looks like water had washed out the dirt under the cement, so when walked over it caved. We weren´t hurt in any way. I don´t think we even got dirt on our pants. To me it´s another testimony of how the Lord protects his missionaries.

We´ve been working hard this week, but missionary work is a difficult process of planning, finding, planning, teaching, planning, progressing, planning, and baptizing. The first eight steps are the hardest. We found a good number of people to teach this week, and we left our ´´mole´´ investigators in our area book.
Cool miracle this week! We were tracting when we came across a family of four( a mom and three kids). We asked if we could share a message with them, and they accepted. The mom told us that she and her daughter didn´t live in that house, but that they lived in Uberlândia, IN THE AREA WHERE I SERVED. I was able to give them the address of the church there and they said that they´d visit. Now we´re going to teach her two sons that live here. Que Milagre!

I think that that´s all I have to say for today.
Until next week.
Elder David Short

Training

So our week was quite fantastical. Tuesday night the zone leaders came to do some training in the area. They gave talks on focusing the work and putting all your effort where it counts most. We´ve decided that we´re only working within the area of the chapel. They spent the night and the next day we all went on splits. Wednesday was Brazil´s Independence Day, so the priesthood had a BBQ at the church. While Elder Brelaz was on splits with the zone leaders, he was able to set two baptismal dates and the next day we found a family of five that accepted the invitation to be baptized.
So now that we´re limiting our work to the area of the church, we´re walking a lot less and teaching a lot more. Our mission goal f referrals per week is 60 per companionship and this week we finally hit our goal. So now we´re going to see the promised blessing that come from it.
I feel inspired to share a story that the mission president´s wife shared. She gave an example of investigators. There exists two types of investigators: Potatoes and Shrimp. If you are to put potatoes and shrimp into two separate pots of boiling water the potatoes will get all soft and mushy and the shrimp will stay firm. Thus it is with investigators. You have the soft investigators that don´t progress and get mushy and you have the solid investigators that stay firm. The lesson was that you can´t wait for potatoes to get firm, because they won´t. Throw out the potatoes and focus on the shrimp.

Well I hope that all is well in your neck of the woods. Until next week.
Love,
Elder David Short

more pics

pics