Well Everyone,
This week I was certainly taught about faith and revelation. Last week I wrote a little bit about how our investigators starting falling through. But we recieved a miracle referral. Cibele is dating a future missionary and after she visited the church with her boyfriend she sent her own name to recieve the missionaries. When we showed up at her house and she saw us she screamed, "You really came!" and ran to open the door. We´ve been teaching her with her boyfriend and she is going to be baptized on the 27th!
Friday morning is when my faith really started to be tested. We had a suprise leadership meeting. I was in a really bad mood this day and was just sitting their thinking, "What now?" Pres. Pinho stood in front of the mission are started to show all the baptismal numbers from every area for the past 2 months and started talking about how we weren´t baptizing enough. He said that we have to baptized weekly! I didn´t believe it! I thought ," This is impossible!" I left that meeting a bit frustrated and had a lost a little of my confidence in myself and in Pres. Pinho BUT the Lord has a funny way of doing things...
That night we found an old investigator named Magali that disappeared a month ago. She was waiting for us to come that night and when we asked who would do the opening prayer she asked is she could. In her prayer she started to cry and thanked God that he had led us back to her home. She has troubles with working on Sunday but we asked her to talk to her boss and without hesitation she said she´ll ask for work off on Sunday´s so that she can become a member of the church. We are planning on baptizing her at the end of next month.
Saturday we had even more miracles. In the morning we were walking and ran into a young man in the ward and his cousin Wallice who visited the church last week. He stopped us and said, "Hey I want to be baptized." And I said, "How about the 3rd?" He accepted. Later that day we returned to teach Jusalino, Juares, Adriano, and Aelson and they we so open to the message and accepted to prepare for baptism for the 17th. Then later we were walking in the street and a woman that we contacted a few weeks ago stopped us and asked why we hadn´t visited her yet. In reality we had been trying to contact her for 2 weeks but she was never home. Her name is Fransica and is a nurse. She had been working everytime we went to her house. Now we marked a visit and she already said that she´s going to start going to Church every other week when she doesn´t have work. Then that night we finally talked to the rest of Pedro´s family and his mom was way confused about the beliefs of the Church so we worked it all out and she asked us to come back Sunday to talk to the whole family.
Sunday they asked me to speak in sacrament meeting. I talked about the Atonement and how Christ suffered for everyone, even people that aren´t baptized. I said that if someone doesn´t know about or accept the Gospel then Christ suffered in vain. I wasn´t planning on burning people but in the end of the talk it just kind of spilled out when I said, "Christ is suffering in vain because our nieghbors don´t live the gospel and it´s not even our nieghbors fault because they don´t know. It´s our fault because we know the truth and aren't sharing it, Christ is suffering because we aren´t sharing the Gospel. I love to be a missionary but I know that I don´t need a little badge to do missionary work." A few people after said that it was really necissary that someone finally say it. I felt super bad after but it already happened so I can´t really do anything about it.
So Sunday after Church we headed over to talk to Pedro´s family and everyone was there, Gildo, Cassia, Pedro, and Luis Felipe (and his sister Maria Eluisa who is 6). We taught the Plan of Salvation and they accepted to be baptized on the 10th! Gildo asked to do the closing prayer. He said, "Thank you God for the baptismal challenge and we are commited to do everything so that we can fulfill it and be baptized on the 10th."
Alright so God showed me that I need to believe in revelation. Pres. Pinho promised us that it is possible to baptize weekly and God is fulfilling that promise. Starting the 27th we have people for 5 weeks getting ready and commited to be baptized! I learned a lot about faith this week. When God makes promises we better believe that they are going to happen. I felt so much joy the past few days becuase of what I learned and the atonement that is making a difference in the lives of all our investigators.
Elder MacLane Taggart
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