Dear Everyone,
Well another week has come and gone. This week another important date passed, January 5th. Why is this date important? Because it means that the 5 month countdown has begun and I only have the fingers of one hand left as a servant of the Lord... mixed emotions for sure.
The work is going well. Opening the area is a little challenging but when it´s more challenging the miracles start to happen. For example, Gleice. Gleice is a woman who has been going to church for 5 years, her children are all baptized. She has been battling to marry her husband for all this time then one day she decided that her desire to baptize was stronger than her desire to keep fighting with her husband. So she kicked him out and will be baptized on the 22nd!
The ward is also super excited to have new missionaries in the area and they are getting into gear as far as missionary work is going. The past two weeks we have received tons of referrals! One was named Raiy. He is about 20-years-old and doesn´t have very developed social skills but does anything you ask him so he is fulfilling all of his commitments. He understands all the principles that we teach but at times gets kind of confused so we´re taking it kind of slow. After church this week he came up to me and said, "Thank you for having guided me. I have found the right path and will be here every Sunday." It made me feel so good for him to actually open up a little bit like that. He´s preparing to be baptized on the 28th along with his brother.
We also have Alexssandra who is progressing really well. She has really started opening up to us after the initial shock of trading the Elders. Seeing Nayara, her best friend, get baptized and confirmed really helped her a lot.
We had a really funny family home evening this week with a less active family. We show up and it´s almost sunset to find the house completely black. Why? The power went out, but the family insisted that we still have the family home evening, alright grab the candles. I didn´t know how many children the woman had and discovered that she has 9! And she takes care of some of the neighbors' children and their was another family from the ward there. Result:Chaos! I have come to discover that I cannot handle children at all. I started to feel short of breath and started losing my patient because they would not be quiet. My the end I just had to sit down and watch it all go down instead of being part of it. Ha ha! How am I going to be a dad!?!
This Sunday´s testimony meeting was one of the most powerful I have ever been too. I don´t even know why but the spirit was so strong and everyone bore amazing testimonies. Nayara was confirmed and during the testimonies she got up and bore hers! It was amazing. After her I got up and I talked about the privilege to wear the name Jesus Christ on my name tag. When I sat down I started thinking about what it will be like when I can´t use my name tag and started to cry because I felt like a piece of my soul was going to be torn off. A ton of people got up and bore their testimonies about missionary work. Adriano, a brother who did a visit with us this week, said, "We have amazing missionaries here in our ward now. The one visit I did with them changed my week and they have such a good spirit. They need our help! Let´s help them!" Ha ha! A few other people got up and said how the ward needed get working. To finish it all up we sang 'Bela Sião' (Beautiful Zion) which is one of my favorite hymns. I couldn´t even sing because I was crying! I bet a few people were giving us weird looks... Ha ha!
Well that was the week! Hope you liked it! Bye!
Elder MacLane Taggart
No comments:
Post a Comment