Two Pictures This Week!

Hey Mom and family,               4-25-12

Thanks for the email.  Did you get my birthday present??  I sent one to dad as well.  I hope you guys got back home alright.  It must be even lonelier now without me.  Yep you guys probably didn't think that you guys could miss me anymore than what you've already gone through.  Well I'll send a picture of me and a part of my zone.  It's cool, we're gonna be able to Skype for mother’s day.  It'll be legit. 

So this week was pretty good.  You know how I said that we're going to the English School to use the computers right?  So one of the teachers came up to us and asked us to come to one of her classes to help teach English.  So now we've got a sweet deal where we come, we do our English classes to people of all age and then we take their addresses, we give a quickened first lesson and leave.  We're becoming really popular.  Everyone in the street is starting to wave at us and like us.  It's reminding me of when Ammon served the king.  We don't have a king, but we have many higher class people that we can serve by helping their kids and even themselves learn English.  Plus they're figuring out that we're normal, and that we do normal things.  Also the mayor of the town is LDS so we're trying to set up a deal that will allow us to talk about the church by using the media.  We scheduled lunch with his dad tomorrow, so I’m excited to see how that goes.  You guys should pray for us here that that can go through.  If it does we'll set up radio and TV stations and do interviews of us and other influential members in the town and try and have our own religious show that can play every single week. 

This past week we found “Leandro”.  He's new here and he came to work (like everyone else, our town is just a sleepy town; everybody works outside of it).  Anyways, he wants to change and be baptized but he's having some problems with smoking.  You guys could help out with some prayers there as well.  It's cool how we found him.  We were walking on the street and we were kind of in a hurry going towards the church.  Two dudes walked by us and I started feeling uneasy that I shouldn’t talk to them, so I decided to talk with every other man on the way to church.  The next guy I talked to was Leandro and I invited him to be baptized.  He accepted and started saying how God has done so much for him that he might as well as do something for Him in return and be baptized.  So he went to church and liked it a lot. 

Last week we did another in-home BBQ.  We've decided to have a BBQ every p-day night.  It's really cheap here to have one.  It's just 5 bucks per person to fill up on meat.  (Brazilian BBQs don't really eat a whole lot more than just meat.)  Sometimes they have rice and beans and maybe a salad, but usually it's just meat from the grill.  Last Sunday we did a contact with some kids that had a new toy.  Apparently they liked us, so they just gave the toys to us.  They are cool!  I call them the “Clacky Balls”  although they are really called "bate-bate" or in other words "hit-hit".  (Real original name.)  Basically it's a little plastic thing that you hold in your thumb and your index finger.  It's got a string with two balls attached at each end.  And then... you hit them together.  The point is to just make a sweet up and down motion with the balls without stopping.  They get a lot of inertia and I’m not too good at it, so my wrist and fingers are killing me for how many times these balls have hit me. 

Yesterday we went to another area to teach one of our baptisms, Vinicios.  He lives in the middle of nowhere and we had a ride to take us there.  He was getting home late so we decided to play some soccer.  We realized how bad we really are, two dumb Americans kicking around a ball.  Anyways, I ended up trying to jump a wall to get the ball that we kicked way away and I ended up not clearing it and falling.  Luckily there was a random pile of sand on the other side to catch my fall.  My hands got all sore and have some scrapes.  I guess if that sand wasn’t there it could've been worse.  It shows me the random tender mercies from God.  I guess He's always looking out for me, even though I may be a little bit stupid.  Anyways, I hope all is well there in the Oregon.  I love you guys!

Elder Williams

                                                    Peter's Zone!!

Two New Posts From Peter!

Hey Mom,                                           4-17-12

Thanks for the email!  This week was very good, every day was an effective day.  It's a cool thing to see! We could work really, really hard, but if it's not efficient, we just don't feel good.  So of course, on the days that we just futilely knock on doors, we finish feeling like we wasted our day.  Preach My Gospel, really helps in that category, it says that we should speak to everyone, but it also says that the best baptism is through member references.  So we've been trying our best to improve our relations with our members and we've gotten a lot more references.  We did our first FHE here with a member.  It was WAY good.  We watched a 20 minutes restoration video that we show to investigators.  That video is super strong.  My companion made the observation that when the restoration happened; God and Christ appeared at the same time to restore the church.  If we read the scriptures we can see times when One or the other appears, but never  BOTH of them!  It's a very bold statement that we as members of the Church state, but it's true. 

We've been trying our best to work with the less actives as well.  A good part of them have family members that they live with, that aren’t members.  If we baptize them then there’s a good chance that their family members will also be reactivated.  We met a lady the other day that become inactive together with her family here.  It's a very sad thing to see.  She admitted to us that she knew that the church was true and that she wouldn’t go to other churches.  But she started smoking again saying that she could stop easily if she went back to church.  You guessed it…She doesn’t take any effort to go back.  She's upset with the bishop, she claims she was offended by some of the members,  etc.  It's like she actively rebelled against the commandments of God without purposely meaning to.  Of course she knows what she's doing, but doesn’t want to do anything about it. 

Mom, As far as the Alma question goes (Alma 32-33…Ammon full of joy and falling unconscious), I’ve never fallen to the ground before, I think that he feels a completely different level of joy.  However, when someone ends up doing what they're supposed to, I get really happy and a good relieved feeling.  I've spent many breathless Sundays waiting to see if our investigators are up and ready to be picked up, if they'll go to church and if they'll like it when they go. 

These past days me and my companion built an old-school barbeque out of bricks and a grate we found in our oven.  Last Friday night we made a BBQ to celebrate.  Next time I’ll take pictures and show you guys.  Last week I ended falling into temptation and bought a hammock.  I tried putting it up between a bar and our clothes line and I ended up falling and hurting my elbow.  So I tried putting the hammock up on a grate on our window…as of today  it's still good, but there's a chance that our window will be falling out soon. 

Yesterday we went to another area that we're in charge of.  There’s no missionaries there and all the members are sad.  I really like it there and I’m tempted to ask the president if I could go there one time in my mission.  Anyway, we received a reference so we were teaching a girl that wanted to get baptized, but her mom won’t let her.  She's  20 yrs old, you'd think she'd be able to make her own choices by now!  This girl had a ton of deep doctrine questions.  It was cool for me to put my knowledge to the test and I was surprised to see that I actually knew quite a bit.  Maybe I don't understand it all, but it was cool to see that I could at least answer the questions. 

These past couple of days we've been working with a member that has been helping us out a lot!  He has a disability that makes him unable to walk correctly and his whole left arm is withered.  It's really cool to see him walk a ton with us and help us out, even though he may not look physically able to do it.  It makes me see that I can do a whole lot more when I get back home to help out the missionaries.

Good work to dad for surprising you guys by driving to Utah!  I’m jealous of Cassan and Sam! I can’t wait to visit them.  Currently, we're here at an English school to use the internet for free and to teach English every now and again.  There's a ton of little kids that are swarming us trying to speak English, its fun! 

Well, Love you guys!         Elder Williams

POST #2:

Hey Dad!                             4-17-12

Thanks for the email,  sorry it's been a while since I’ve written.  It seems like I've said just about everything in the last letter to mom.  It's hard for me to remember some things that happen, yesterday for example, we woke up early to get to a district meeting, but we left a little bit later than normal (my companion was combing his hair) and we ended up seeing our bus leave the bus station.  For whatever reason we thought that we could catch up to it se we started to run after it.  After about 3 minutes of the bus taking off,  then stopping at a light, then going,  then stopping to pick up some people,  we ended up missing it.  You'd think the driver would see two idiots 40 feet behind him running, waving their hands and whatnot... but he didn’t.  Anyways, this was at about 5:30 in the morning.  That day we ended getting home at 10:30, because we went to an area that was far away.  (With days like this, everything gets all mixed up in the head when I go to record them.)   Anyway, to finish the story:  We ended up taking a bus to Campinas (which was going in the opposite direction) so that we could take a bus to where we needed to go.  There weren’t any buses going directly from our area to where we needed to go.  We wasted a ton of money in doing so.  Therefore, we decided NOT to ride a bus on the way back, so we ended up going onto the highway to hitchhike our way back to the other area we needed to get to.  When got there, we were successful with the references there, then we got a ride back to our area from one of the members (which was a big sacrifice because it’s about 45 minutes one way) and he topped it off by giving us 40 bucks to spend (just completely out of the blue... which is always a good thing!).  I think he was trying to pay us off so that we would say something good to the president so that he would put missionaries back into his ward.  Never-the-less, he’ll be blessed for his sacrifice.

I’m jealous of your surprise trip to Utah, dad!  If it were me,  I probably would have done the EXACT same thing by driving all night and surprising Chris, Annie, and mom at their door in the morning! 

There are some many things I’m learning about the gospel here on the mission.  It's crazy how much clearer everything spiritual has become being here, than when I was back at home.  For instance, the commandments make much more sense out here on my mission… It's like anything else we study, we can’t study something complicated if we don't even understand the basic stuff.  I like the scripture you quoted (1 Nephi 13:37).  These past couple of weeks, I've really been trying my best to enjoy the presence of the Holy Ghost in my life.  Everything just turns out right if I do that.  I would encourage you and everyone reading this, to try it out whenever possible!  Anyways, I love you dad!

Elder Williams

The Lord Protects Those in His Employ

Hey family!                                                                                    4-4-12

"Petra's" looking cute (the new name for Lily)!  Good work on the baby annie! 

These past weeks were good.  We had another BBQ gathering today.  We tried to get some sun tanning in as well, but it was really hot so we just left early to go use the internet (P-Day). 

 Conference was so good!  I learned so much.  I loved Elder Holland's talk about Christ's Parable of the workers.  It's really true about how some people envy and get jealous about the blessings that they don't get.  There are so many people here in the mission that are just like that.  They aren't looking to do their duty as missionaries, they're here to get power over OTHER missionaries.  There's a lot more politics that happen in the mission than I thought there were.  That's why I'm liking my new companion so much more than my last one.  He's just here to serve. There's a totally different spirit in the work now.  We're here to baptize for the glory of God and not necessarily here to be made the "assistant" or the next zone leader!  Im loving the mission, but a lot of missionaries make it into something that it isn't and shouldn't be.  It's kind of sad if I think about it. 

 The mission just baptised 3 people this week.  It was an all time low on the mission.  Needless to say, the President wasn't too happy about it.  Last monday we had a miracle.  We had a meeting at the presidents house where we talk about the mission and things like that; it went fine.  Afterwards we drank some more açaí drink and waited for our bus to come.  After a while our bus came by, it was super packed, but we didn't want to wait anymore so we got on it anyway.  After a few minutes, for whatever reason, we decided that we just didn't want to stand up all the way back to our area, we felt prompted to get off.  So we got off and waited for the next bus.  Ten minutes later the next bus passed by and we got on.  About 20 minutes later and close to our area, we looked out our side window and saw that same bus that we had initially got on and had been prompted to get off,  was laying in the ditch with an ambulance carrying bodies off, and frantic people standing around.  I'm pretty sure that if we stayed on that bus we probably would have died.  We were feeling pretty blessed.  Later when we got home and I started studying for a training that I would have to do the next day.  I just happened to opened up the scriptures ironically straight to D&C 25:2, which talked about how if we're faithful and virtuous the Lord will protect our life... it was a good one.  It's so cool to see how much the Lord protects his elders.  It's a big testimony builder that Christ is the master that can really do anything, it's only through Him and for Him that we should work and baptize.  Anyways I love you all!
Elder Williams