The Work is Tough but Rewarding!

Zone Conference was this week with blurry picture. 6 Elders, 6 Sisters and only one American. Elder Christofferson is LOVING it! 

A cute lady from his ward sent me a picture from church yesterday! I LOVE modern technology! 

Hello Everyone!

So week 2 in the field is over! It was a crazy week with a lot of highs and lows but in the end it is the Lord's work so everything is great!

The weather here is starting to warm up and walking around in a shirt and tie, and slacks gets pretty hot. I come back to the apartment everyday pretty exhausted but I love the feeling!

Elder Santana and I are getting closer everyday. We share stories as we walk, all of them in Portuguese/English. But we work well together. We are starting to think the same in terms of spiritual impressions and who to talk to. It is really awesome.

So some things that happened this week: Tuesday we decided to focus on a small list we found in the apartment of inactive members. There are A LOT of inactive members here. That is one of the biggest problems here in Brazil is keeping people in the church after they get baptized. Anyways Tuesday was spent searching for people, which is crazy here because half of the time the houses are numbered randomly. Anyway, we had talked to 4 or 5 inactive members who generally were receptive and said they would try to come to church Sunday. Then we found this inactive member named Adão, or Adam in English. He was excited to see us. Our approach with inactive members is to try and get them to remember the Spirit and feelings they felt the first time they heard the Restoration of the Gospel lesson. We asked him and he said he remembered but not all of it. So we taught it to him again. The lesson was awesome. The Spirit was so strong and we told him he can come back and be a marvelous servant of God. He got emotional and said he didn't feel worthy to come back to church but we told him that The Savior wants him back. It was a great lesson and we found out that he knows quite a bit about the church! It is lessons like these every week that remind me of why I am here. We taught him another great lesson Friday night and he said he would come to church. But as the life of a missionary goes, when Sunday rolled around Adão wasn't at church. I was pretty sad because I really thought we were making progress with him and that he was going to return. But we know that this happened for a reason so we are going to go see him again this week for sure!

After Tuesday the next 3 days were tough. Brazil had it’s Independence Day this week so no one wanted to talk to us much. Friday night we were feeling pretty down. Saturday was a complete turnaround though!!  We got 5 new investigators in just that one day! God works in mysterious ways but it is the right way! 

One cool story in particular: Earlier in the week we had been walking home one night and I saw a man walking and I thought we should talk to him. Then apparently my companion got the same impression because he talked to him first! His name is Jonathan and he is about 20 years old and knows about the church from his friend who is a member from where he grew up. He said we could go teach him later in the week and he gave us his info. So Saturday night we found his house but he was not there. But his older brother Patrick was. He let us in and we taught him the Gospel of Jesus Christ lesson. It was another very Spiritual lesson. He said he has been worried about his brother, Jonathan, and that they both need something good in their lives like this gospel. He invited us back next week! 

This work is tough but rewarding and I know it's true!! 

Love you all!

Elder Spencer P. Christofferson