Chapter 22: The Rameumpton

 11/24/2020

Well, today is a sad landmark, I’m now 2/3rds of the way done with my mission. It’s sad to think that the amount of time that I spent in Brazil is all that I have left to be able to touch people’s lives as a 18-20 year old missionary. It wasn’t such a hopeless feeling prospect until I hit my year mark, and then it stopped feeling like I had a lot of time left, to realizing that I only would get to do that one more time. Now it feels all to short. In reality, I should be grateful that I’m getting this feeling with eight months left, instead of only a couple like is the case for some other missionaries, I still have lots of opportunities left, but landmarks always make the time feel horribly limited. Today we taught a couple lessons which was a lot of fun. We had a mission wide meeting this morning where they shared our numbers with us as a mission, and my zone found out we were reporting the lowest numbers in the mission. Somehow, inexplicably, this always seems to happen to me. I shared my lament with some of my district members and they all remarked the same, “yeah! This keeps happening, I’m always in those areas” which actually gives me a lot of confidence that the Lord has put us here because He knows we can help this area get to be the treasured area He sees it as. On a more apostate note, I built the rameumpton out of metal folding chairs. It was about as physically stable as the proud Zoramites were in their mental states.

11/25/2020

Today was a good day. We had an incredible lesson with the Gammon family. We played a game with them called “The Gratitude Game” which is like a hot-potato style game where family members will share what they’re grateful for about each other. There was a family in our ward with a record of saying 41 things they were grateful for when the Sisters taught them, and the highest we Elders had seen before was 23. Well, we challenged the Gammon family to be 41 and they did… with 42. We were all so excited, it was an awesome moment. We got to do a lot of walking again tonight, which was fun for us, but not a lot of fun for Gomez because my walking speed is still set to ‘Brazil’. One of the Elders we share a car with was passing a kidney stone tonight, and so Collins called us telling us they were going to come out to give us a ride. Well, they live almost an hour away and don’t have the miles to use for a drive like that, so we told them that we would walk the hour to our house. It actually went really well, and we were grateful for the opportunity to destress while we walked. The Sisters were really nice to us and offered to bring our stuff to us in their car, so we didn’t even have to pack all of our stuff back home, which made for a very nice walk. The Elder who got the kidney stone is fine now.

11/26/2020

Happy Thanksgiving! Today was one of the best Thanksgivings I’ve ever had, and definitely the best one I’ve had on the mission, since last year I didn’t realize Thanksgiving had happened until a couple days after it had passed. The reason our Thanksgiving was so good today was because of the service project that we got to do as a DIstrict. This was the second time that I’d ever gotten to do service with my District, and it was a blast to get to engage with them over something so simple, yet almost trivial compared to the high stakes work we’re always obsessing about. To be forced to take a break and do something fun as a team was really nice. We had the goal of picking up trash alongside a river trail, and we didn’t have high expectations because of how well maintained it was, but fortunately we were still able to ransack a couple areas where people had left behind piles of litter. “Ransack” is probably the best term to describe what we did, because among my finds was a black trash bag sack, that I ran away with. It might have belonged to someone, I’m not sure. We managed to get SO much stuff, and I felt very useful, since I spotted so many well masked litter hideaways, and dove through thorny bushes and dense forest enclosures to get to them. At one point, we even found a partially buried sign, which was sticking out of the dirt, and when we King Arthur style yanked it out of the dirt, I’m pretty sure that we instantaneously saved like, three turtles. The amount of trash you pick up is proportional to the amount of turtles you save, so I personally saved like, 16 turtles today.

11/27/2020

Today was a lot of fun! Everyone’s still pretty busy because they’re recovering from their turkey induced comas (I guess), but Gomez and I were still able to get a lot of work done. Today was also the day that I finished the Prophet’s challenge to post on social media for seven days with the #givethanks tag. It was incredible to see just how true the Prophet’s counsel was that I would be more full of hope afterwards, gratitude does have an incredible ability to shape our lives for the better, and to help us to feel of God’s joy and love.

11/28/2020

Today was pretty busy. We had two different service projects today, one was with our Bishop and the other was with a widow in our ward. We really like doing service projects since it’s the one way that we can meet with people in public. The meeting that we had with our Bishop was also especially significant, because that was the first time that I’ve gotten meet with him in any way. We’ve had Ward councils and Sacrament meetings where we’ve seen and talked to him, but never a personalized meet-up where we were able to talk to him outside his capacities as Bishop. He introduced us to his sons today which was cool, because I had no idea who the members of his family were. Our other service project was also super successful. We were clipping tree branches and trimming bushes down. The Sister that we were helping didn’t have very many tools so we did the best with what we had. She wanted some really thick branches cut down, and had some not-very-big branch clippers to get the job done. Gomez and I remedied this by making up for our lack of leverage with brute force. He would grab one end of the handle and I would grab the other, and we would push together as hard as we could. This worked for several branches, all of them ending in loud snaps as we crushed the limbs between the clippers. Eventually Gomez and I got to a branch that was just a little to big though, and as we pushed we ended up snapping the clippers. The metal end of the clippers that was used to cut the branches snapped off. Gomez and I felt pretty good about our strength after that, but horrible that we had just damaged this widow’s tool beyond repairs. Hopefully Walmart sells some cheap since we also don’t have a lot of money to replace them… After our “service” at that Sister’s house, we walked a half hour back home, although Google says it should have been 45 minutes. We’re good at taking shortcuts, and only had to cut through one wilderness area that might have been someone’s yard, we’re not really sure. The only other significant event today was when I courageously rescued my companion from the clutches of a dangerous spider. Well, that might’ve been exaggerating. The spider was about the side of a quarter, although I did wrestle with it for a full five minutes to keep it on a piece of paper long enough for me to take it outside. I would pick it up, and it would immediately run and jump off the paper, and then I would yell at it for not being very smart since I was trying to save its life, which probably agitated it more and caused this cycle to repeat for five minutes until the spider eventually wore itself out and I was able to get it outside, much to my companion’s relief.

11/29/2020

Today was a really good day. We had a goal as a mission of doubling the number of new companionships that found someone, which meant going from about 50% of people who had found someone going to about 80% (20% of our mission finding pretty regularly, so our goal was more about increasing the number of companionships that were finding rather than just increasing the number of people being found). I had been here for 13 weeks, and we hadn’t found anyone yet, but today we were able to set up an appointment with someone for tomorrow, which will be a pickup lesson and a new person. It won’t count towards this week’s finding stats since this week ended tonight at 8:30, but it was still fun to be a part of the wave of finding new people. We found through a small Facebook group, which I didn’t think was very likely in our area since we had really tried as a District for a long time to work on the Facebook groups in the surrounding area and we just weren’t finding anyone, but tonight all of our efforts paid off. Tomorrow we’ll get to have a pick up lesson.

Today more than a specific verse I wanted to share a message that we see through the book of Daniel. In addition to having a brother who was named after this prophet, this book has always stood out to me because it is such a spectacular account. Daniel was a prophet who was highly favored, and served in high positions under five different kings. Daniel much like most of us, would occasionally wonder why the Lord had picked him to receive such incredible blessings, in which case he always heard the reply, "for thou art greatly beloved". The greatest gift that we've received is that of the Atonement from Christ, in response to this great blessing all of us are left wondering, 'how can it be that Jesus Christ would make an Atonement for me? And the answer will always come to us the same as it did to Daniel, "for thou art greatly beloved". You are greatly beloved and that is a promise that I make to you in the name of Jesus Christ.

I love you all!

---

Chapter 21: Success and Exploding Keyboards

My Alphasmart keyboard that I would type up my journals on died this week, which was pretty sad, especially because I lost a couple days worth of notes. Fortunately I was able to get another keyboard today so I'll be able to go back to writing insanely long emails next week. If it somehow comes as a disappointment that I didn't write as much this week, then enjoy the break, you deserve it after getting this far through my mission's accountings. 

11/20/2020

Even though my keyboard broke, today was an awesome enough day that it merits the pain of typing out a journal entry with just my thumbs. Today we heard inspired counsel from the Prophet to utilize gratitude to help us find hope, and eventually, faith. We also received harsher COVID rules, scaling back our ability to teach in homes, but it worked out okay today. They told us that the rules would go into effect starting at 5:00 today, which I guess is when the COVID comes out? So we crammed all of our in person lessons in before five tonight when the rules would change. Yes, we had to cram them in, because today we had five lessons with members. We broke our record again! We were ecstatic to have so many lessons today, and were even more joyful when we repeatedly heard the phrase, "that was exactly what I needed today". We also got a really nice thank you from a member afterwards, thanking us for acting as more than missionaries, acting as members of their family who truly loved them and completed their home. Those were incredible words to hear.

11/22/2020

We're really starting to gain momentum in Monument. Today we taught seven lessons, blowing the record we made earlier this week of five out of the water. Seven is even a little better than what we were normally doing with nonmembers in Brazil, we would average about five or six lessons a day there, so getting seven here with our members made it feel like we were really being efficient. Our lessons would be unplanned in Brazil, all people who we would find that day, which was exciting, but not a super efficient way of working. Today we had a couple unplanned lessons, but the majority of them were planned, which was cool to see that some of the skills I'd gained from Brazil are useful here, but that we were also following a better, more well structured plan than I use to. This week we also hit the mission standard of excellence for lessons, which I wasn't sure if we would ever do. For an area that has quadrupled in the number of missionaries, we expected the area to be overwhelmed, and incapable of supporting all four companionships as far as work is concerned. Hitting the mission standard of excellence (between 15-20 lessons a week, and we got 17), is a really big deal and a testament to how our ward is grown. This is a really big landmark because it shows a lot of reactivation among members, and an overall effort on everyone's part to be more Christlike. Members taking an interest in meeting with the missionaries is an activity indicator, and so it's really cool to see that even with Coronavirus, this ward is becoming more active than they ever have been before.

I realized that my emails aren't completely accurate, they're about a 50% view of what's been happening for me. I've shared all the details of what's happening in my life, except for the lessons that I'm learning, and so I wanted to share some additional thoughts besides my regular Spiritual thought. The reason we were so successful this week was, in part, affected by one of my decisions. In Alma 26:22 we read of the account of Ammon who describes his mission experiences: Yea, he that repenteth and exerciseth faith, and bringeth forth good works, and prayeth continually without ceasing—unto such it is given to know the mysteries of God; yea, unto such it shall be given to reveal things which never have been revealed; yea, and it shall be given unto such to bring thousands of souls to repentance, even as it has been given unto us to bring these our brethren to repentance. 

This promise hit me with incredible power, I've read through this verse many times before and never had my heart touched in the same way. Why was this so significant? The area we've been working in is one of the least fruitful areas in the mission, so to feel the Holy Ghost, God Himself, make this promise to me on conditions that I repent, exercise faith, labor diligently, and pray without ceasing, that I will be an effective tool in His hands to learn, prophesy, help people find the same joy of the Gospel through repentance that I've found, is an incredible promise. The success that we found this week was proof of that promise. I had tried for 12 weeks to hit our mission standard of excellence and failed. I failed twelve times in a row before we hit this goal, something that changed the moment I started exercising my faith. Miracles follow our faith.

Additionally I wanted to share a thought from a talk I liked. Elder Soares in his talk from the October 2020 General Conference shared the metaphor of a magnet, representing sin: "Metaphorically speaking, yielding to temptation is like approaching a magnet with a metal object. The magnet’s invisible force attracts the metal object and holds it tightly. The magnet loses its power over it only when the metal object is placed far from it. Therefore, just as the magnet is unable to exercise power over a faraway metal object, as we resist temptation, it fades away and loses its power over our mind and heart and, consequently, over our actions." That analogy is incredible, but and I would like to expand upon it. In this world it is impossible to remain stagnant. Just like it's impossible to truly balance a metal object to be suspended between two magnets indefinitely, so too are we always moving. Elder Soares described the magnet of sin and temptation, and the other is the magnet of Christ. As we allow ourselves to be drawn to the sweet music of the Gospel we are moving closer to the magnet of Christ. In fact, anything that we do to exercise our faith in Christ, moves us closer to him and further away from Satan. I love this analogy for a couple reasons: One is that the magnet of Christ does more than allow us to draw unto Him at quicker and quicker speeds, the magnet of Christ actually pushes away Satan and stops his magnetic fields from affecting us. As we draw close to Christ, even the loud seemingly powerful pull of the adversary is completely blocked by infinitely stronger power Christ is.

I love you all, I'm praying for you!

Elder Anderson

The pictures are of the lengths that we went to so that we could have internet during our lessons. Our house is completely shielded from data, so we climbed this mountain to have a great backdrop and data during our lessons. 

Chapter 20: Heavy Machinery

11/9/2020

Today was a great pday. It was one of the first in a very long time that we haven't really had anything going on, it's too cold to be motivated to go on a hike or something, and COVID rules don't allow for much right now anyways. So I got to spend my day studying, and talking with my family. It was very nice to have a relaxing Pday. Then we had a meeting as a Zone to discuss our goals and what we wanted to do as a Zone. The meeting was pretty slow, and definitely not the most engaging one I've been to, but we set some goals for next week so it was a productive meeting.

11/10/2020

Today was a lot of fun! We got to see the Hudsons, who I love talking to because their dad served in Manaus, and we share so many common stories and interests. We both lamented tonight over the great fruit and fish that we wish that we could be eating, but are being deprived of in the United States. He was very excited to hear about the Feijao Carioca that I got gifted, because he really misses the beans and rice we would eat everyday as well. At the end of our meeting, he very kindly gifted my comp and I a bottle of Guarana, a soda from Brazil. I excitedly called my District afterwards and told them about the treasure we had received and we all made plans to do a soda taste test on Thursday when we all get together for our District counsel. Some of the Elders had already tried Guarana, and remembered how much they loved it, which only added to the excitement of everyone else. We're going to have a very good meeting on Thursday.

11/11/2020

Today I wasn't the model of responsiblity, I completely forgot that we had a Facebook post to put up tomorrow. Fortunately we had a lesson today, and so we were able to twist the lesson into a filming session. The family that we filmed did great! We would have just put something together ourselves, but the mission decided that for these next couple of months we would only focus on members, not on missionaries, and so we're being encouraged, or rather coerced, into making videos of members and their families. That isn't a setback though, it's actually a really good thing, and it's something I've been trying to do since I was with Elder Collins. By having a majority of the posts that I've put up focused on members, we've gotten a lot more interaction from other ward members. We also had a service project with our district today. We were putting together bags of food for the homeless and it turned into one great assembly line where we organized everything as fast as humanly possible, as we had a one hour time limit thanks to COVID rules. That was a really fun service though, that's the first time that I ever got to do service with my district, so that was pretty cool. The other significant event that happened today occured as we were leaving the church. Elder Gomez was playing around with new ringtones today and finally decided on one of a small child saying, "bring, bring" (like, "ring ring" but with a little bit of a tongue roll on the "r"). That ringtone sounded perfectly normal in the daytime, but as we were walking out, we were both startled to hear a small child say "bring". It came from about waist level-the exact height a child with a voice like that would be, and I thought that there was a demon child following us since that voice came out of nowhere. It also scared Gomez, but whereas I was just startled, he actually jumped several feet to the side and screamed. He jumped so high, that's the hardest I've laughed in a long time.

11/12/2020

Today was a great day! We had a District Counsel today, and it was pretty normal except for two Sisters who had to join over Zoom since they were exposed to COVID. We (The rest of the District) also were exposed to those Sisters after they were exposed, although fortunately we don't have to quarantine since the Sisters aren't showing any symptoms. After the District Counsel, we broke out the bottle of Guarana. I checked the "Best by" date, and saw that it expired in October of last year. I didn't even know that was possible. It was a very flat soda, but still very good. We had a couple of lessons today which went even better than usual, and we posted a video that our members made on Facebook. We also got to do another service project where we used a lawnmower. We don't know if we're allowed to use a lawnmower or not, it's a gas powered tool, but apparently they're used quite frequently and no one's answered our question about it yet. Either way, we mowed the lawn for an elderly couple, so it was definitely a necessity; They're a really cute couple, they keep insisting that we're "God-sent". I mean, we are, so I guess it's not a bad summary of our mission calls.

11/13/2020

Today was a great day. We had three lessons, one of which was a birthday lesson. We might have just become Gospel entertainers? Like, entertainers, but we use the Gospel. I think it's pretty entertaining. The lessons went well. We also made family connections for like, three different families in our ward. It's really weird when you get to know everyone seperately, and then it turns out that everyone you know has ties to each other. I feel very left out; I'm not related to anyone in this ward. They should stop being related to each other to make me feel better. Collins and I have been accumulating a library of historical documents and the records of various general authorities who've spent time analyzing them. It's been going pretty well, and been some very interesting stuff. We also got some nice surprises from people in our ward. Several families brought us treats tonight, and one family even dropped off food for us which was a miracle since we ended up having to feed ourselves this week a lot more than we thought we would, and we were running pretty low on food supplies. Getting more supplies was an incredible tender mercy.

11/14/2020

Today was good! We had the coolest service project that I've ever gotten to do. We went over to Brother White's house (The White House) originally expecting to rake leaves, but when we got there his next door neighboor and son was shoving all of his fallen branches from our big winter storm a couple of weeks ago through a wood chipper. Brother White was over there helping his son out despite his advanced age, and so I think it was good that we showed up because we were able to help him and his son out at the same time. I thought that getting to use a shovel was about the most fun I could possibly have, but I was wrong, getting to send giant logs through that woodchipper and watch them disintegrate was a lot more fun. Then we got to shovel the woodchips out of the back of the truck where they were collecting, so a shovel + a woodchipper = best service ever. Everyone was very timid about the machine that would suck everything up and destroy it, but I had a lot of fun playing up close and personal with it. Playing with a woodchipper probably isn't a good habit to be in, though.

11/15/2020

Today was a great day. We had a couple of lessons which went really well, and my companion and I finally got to give talks. Gomez refused to go first, which was a timing problem for me. I can talk for an insanely long time, and so I'm great at adjusting my words to either be shorter or longer depending on the amount of time that I have. I've had a lot of practice with cutting my messages down in length since I'll generally overprepare with too much information (like this journal, this is very information saturated). One talk I gave I read 19 scriptures I found on a subject over a couple of days and tied them together. There wasn't any time to give my own thoughts, but that's a good example of how I usually prepare. So when Gomez said he wouldn't go first I was very nervous, knowing that there was a good chance that we wouldn't end up anywhere close to the time limit we were asked to speak for, and that's exactly what happened. We were asked to speak for 20 minutes together, he told me to leave him four minutes, and then spoke for 15. Both of our talks were really good, though, and no one seemed mad that they had to stay the extra ten minutes, so everything seemed to work out pretty well. Gomez did do an incredible job on his talk. I had planned to speak about the role of the ward in missionary work for the past four weeks and prepared specific breakdowns of what everyone's parts were and how we could be more unified and work together as a whole, but about a half hour before I gave my talk I felt prompted to throw out all of those ideas and share some thoughts on repentance. So I called our ward to repentance. I thought that they might hate us afterwards, but they actually seemed very grateful for it. A lot of people really, really liked the messages. That's always important, the more of the Savior's love that they can feel during talks, the more they seem to like it, and so I think we did a really good job.

The Spiritual thought that I wanted to share today was from Daniel Chapter 3, about Shadrach, Meshach,  and Abed-Nego. These incredible men were valiant examples of faith, in the story of how they were cast into a furnace for their beliefs, they placed faith not in their deliverance, but in their loyalty to God. They told king Nebuchadnezzar that regardless of God's omnipotent power and His will, they would choose to trust in Him.

17 If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.

18 But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.

I pray that we have the same strength to resist Satan in our lives, the same strength to look unto Christ in all things, and I promise that all who exercise faith in Him will find perfect deliverance from the attacks of the adversary.

Chapter 19: "Aggressive Driving" -TiWi

11/2/2020

Today was a great Pday. We were in a rush this morning because we offered to help a man in our ward move his lathe. His 400 pound machine was getting put onto a trailer, and said the service project wouldn't take more than five minutes, but would be impossible for him to do alone, so even though it was a very short project, we still had to make the 15 minute drive out, and we ended up rushing from Walmart to get there. After we dropped off our groceries we went to a farmers market to try to find some specialty spices for me. They didn't have them, which was a letdown, but we found a basil plant that was twice the size of the one I got from Walmart, so now I have two basil plants. We also went to get Elder Gomez new shoes and a haircut. After Pday we worked on making a Facebook video for a post tomorrow, and Elder Gomez being the stud that he his, offered to share his testimony about music, and I put together a pretty great video of him playing. soon I'm going to have to invest in one of those giant camera stabilizers so we can get some really dynamic shots of him playing, stuff like zooming into the individual sweat beads on his forehead, and panning across his stomach. Our video turned out well, but we don't have data at our house to get it approved, so we'll probably have to wait until tomorrow morning when we travel to the church to submit our video.

11/3/2020

Today was Zone Conference! This was probably one of my favorite Zone Conferences ever, because our Mission President was speaking about a topic that I was very passionate about: Personal conversion and becoming better disciples of the Lord. The stuff he talked about was very cool, and I felt that I learned a lot. I was also able to contribute a lot to our Zone Conference. I got called on a lot, and I volunteered a lot, so people probably got sick of hearing my voice, but it was a really cool conference to be a part of. There were a lot of really cool trainings, I got to share my testimony frequently, and Sister Rees gave a very detailed explanation of the verses about the woman by the well that Christ visited that was spectacular. Sister Rees understands the scriptures very, very well. I would love to learn more from her. Today was also significant because we beet the "three lesson block" as in, we would teach three families a day as a maximum, we would frequently try for four lessons in a day, but someone would always cancel. So after two months of trying with this ward, we finally taught four lessons in a day. That's a new personal best for member lessons.

11/4/2020

This morning we had a service project with a widow in our ward. The service was really quick, we ended up cutting down a tree branch and cutting it into pieces, but that was it. Afterwards we employed our service to fix a broom and a bottle of super glue. I thought it was kind of silly that we drove twenty minutes to open a bottle of glue, but we had to use all of our expertise with weighted tools to break open the seal  and make it useable again, so I guess the challenge made it worth it. We also found out that she was the sister of two other members of our ward, and we were able to set up lessons with all of them, so it was a very beneficial visit. Otherwise, the most exciting thing that happened was probably the 68 giant meatballs Elder Gomez and I made up. Thanks to Sister Barnhurst we got to make them out of Elk meat, and there's enough there to last us nine meals, which was pretty awesome. It was very kind of Sister Barnhurst to give us so much meat, and I was very excited to make meatballs out of such a lean meat. Usually when I cook meatballs in the oven they're made out of ground beef with a roughly 30% fat content, so the pan ends up very greasy and the meatballs shrink a lot, but elk meat is like, 5% fat, and so these really didn't shrink and they didn't make a big mess. I made sure to tell Collins what we were up to since I did the same project with him when he was my comp, and he thought it was pretty great that I was going to make my impact on Monument [my current district] the same way that I did for Melody Lane [my first district], since Melody Lane apparently still has meatballs I made up that they haven't used yet.

11/5/2020

Today was a lot of fun. We taught a couple different lessons, one to the Bynum family, and one to a widow in our ward. The Bynum family lesson was super sincere, it was a very good lesson and discussion. The lesson with the widow in our ward was also a lot of fun. We have a goal of having a maximum of 20 minute lessons in our mission, but as soon as we walked in the Spirit whispered that this lesson was going to be a lot longer than that, and that was okay. We ministered to the Sister according to her needs and were able to love her as the Savior would have. We also went through an entire album of photos, which was pretty impressive and took us about 50 minutes. Today was also a lot of fun because I've been working on art again to post something to our ward Facebook page, since that sparked so much missionary work last time. After posting that picture, we had a lot of people want to talk to us, and a lot of people who wanted to share it with those around them which was really cool. I'd been working on watercoloring skin tones, but had never been able to get it down before, but today I finally did it! I did a practice that went pretty well, and will be pretty excited to see how my project goes tomorrow. We also had one of the funniest experiences of my mission when we picked up the Redlands Elders after their dinner. The Elders got in the car looking very defeated and worn out, we asked them what had happened and they informed us that they had just met the crazy people in their ward. Davenport told us "had I been mute, I would have talked as much as I did during that lesson", they had hardly gotten a word in the whole night, and seeing the after effects of listening to these people talk without taking a breath for over an hour was pretty hilarious. I would attempt to describe their wide eyes and exhausted mental states, but there's little I can do to accurately convey how traumatized they were. COVID certainly has an interesting effect on some, that couple had probably only seen isolation for the last eight months, and took it all out on our poor Elders tonight.

11/6/2020

Today was a lot of fun, we got to do service with Brother Lewis for a couple of hours. We finished taking apart his backyard and cleaning out the inside out his house. He was told that there were people moving into his house tomorrow, and then tonight at 6:30 got a text from the landlord saying it was just a joke to get him going since he always procrastinates so much. It worked well enough because we got through everything that we needed to get the house officially cleaned out, so now the house is completely empty, carpets washed, walls repainted, floors shining, and all that. We got to teach a couple of lessons today, one to an elderly couple who invited us over for lunch, and one to their "little sister" another elderly woman and her grandson. The lessons went a little bit long, but were still really good. When we had lunch with the elderly couple we felt terrible, both of the members of that family have to be older than 80. Her hands would shake so bad, I offered her help probably every ten seconds, but she kept firmly insisting she was fine. I'm amazed that she's still making food when she has so little use of her hands. I don't say that to make fun of her, but out of admiration for the way that she tries to serve us, despite her age and failing muscles. There are few acts of service that have been given to us missionaries that have been as meaningful as that woman struggling to make us food to eat. I also got another taste of Brazil tonight: We had to walk to one of our service projects, and being pressed for time I started walking at my normal Brazil walking speed, only to find out that it was killing Gomez and that he couldn't keep up. Fortunately it wasn't too long of a walk, but it was fun to walk at "missionary speed" for a bit, again.

11/7/2020

Sometimes I expect as a missionary that I'm going to get to be super efficient, and never have to slow down, but today was kind of the opposite of that. Because we tried to follow the rules we ended up having to slow down on a couple different occasions and just stand around. There can't be one companionship of Elders and Sisters in the church at the same time, and so when our Elders left we would go wait outside. This morning I looked at our schedule and decided to not bring my jacket with me since we didn't have anything outside today. Well, that was fine until we went to wait outside because one of the companionships left so to keep the rules we had to wait outside. I didn't mind, but I felt bad for my comp because he got cold, even though he had a jacket on. Eventually the Sisters realized what had happened, and came to check on us, saw my comp huddled in the corner away from the wind and rain, and me studying in the rain. They were rather appalled that I wasn't wearing a jacket and made a big deal about me wearing one that they had stolen from the church's 'lost and found', despite my protests that I was "temperature proof". I don't get hot because of Manaus, and wasn't getting cold either, so I was fine. We got in contact with a lot of people today, which was really good. There were a couple of people who we hadn't ever gotten in contact with before, so we were pretty excited. The Sisters also asked us to help them with a video, their idea was to compliment us and to film our reaction, and it turns out that neither my comp nor I can take a compliment. The Sisters tried to film the video without us knowing what they were going to be doing which was tricky with the whole "companions need to be within sight and sound" rule. They filmed my comp first, and apparently he just looked confused when they complimented him, and when it was my turn there was a man in a motorized wheelchair and a racing flag sticking out the back booking it down the road and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It made for an awesome video because as soon as the Sisters were like, "Elder Anderson, we think you're a genius" I was like, "that man is my new hero" and it totally ruined the surprise, but watching it afterwards was hilarious.

11/8/2020

Today was a lot of fun, we got to teach a few lessons, and one of them was to the Gibsons who are one of my favorite families in this ward. We visited the Gibsons for dinner, but it ended up getting very interesting because the Gibsons invited the Sisters to eat with them too, which exceeded the two household COVID rule. So Elder Gomez and I ate a very abbreviated dinner, and then left after about a half hour so that the Sisters who were running late, could have dinner with the Gibsons. It was still a really good dinner, and we got to share a message with all four of us, the Elders and the Sisters together, which was a lot of fun. Elder Bott who we share a car with has a missionary talk show, he promises that people can get Spiritually uplifted in three minutes or less, and invited me to share some brief thoughts on his show. I got to talk about missionary work, and was very honored that he wanted me to co-star in it with him. Bott has asked quite the powerful lineup of missionaries to be a part of his show, and so getting to be included in the roster was very cool for me. Bott doesn't really express emotion, so getting to teach with him is the highest praise he gives. When he asked me to teach with him I was very excited, we all tease him about his show, mostly because if you scroll from one episode to the next to the next really quickly you repeatedly hear, "I'm Elder Bott, I'm Elder Bott, I'm Elder Bott" since that's the first line of his intro and they all start the same. The video turned out really well, and we did it in one take without any planning ahead (which you can tell because I asked Bott a question partway through and he gets visibly nervous), so it was very much from the heart. I also got to talk to one of the counselors in our Mission Presidency today which was pretty cool.

The verses that I wanted to share today come from 1 Samuel 24. In this chapter we read about how David has the opportunity to smite the bloodthirsty Saul who's been chasing him and seeking his life. Yet David doesn't retaliate, rather, he replies how the Lord commanded that we reply to our adversaries with these verses:

12 The Lord judge between me and thee, and the Lord avenge me of thee: but mine hand shall not be upon thee.

13 As saith the proverb of the ancients, Wickedness proceedeth from the wicked: but mine hand shall not be upon thee.

Saul wasn't repentant, yet David still forgave him. As we forgive our wrongdoers we will find the same peace and love in our hearts that David found that allowed him to love not only his friends, but his enemies as well.

Chapter 18: A Scary Week

10/26/2020

Today was a fun Pday. Fortunately, despite the heavy snows that we had last night it melted off the roads and sidewalks pretty fast, so we were able to get to Walmart without a problem. We had a fun time doing weekly shopping, and at 8am after a freak snowstorm, missionaries were pretty much the only people inside of that building, so we all got to converse about the transformations that happened to the landscape last night. It was the first time a couple Elders and Sisters had really been in snow, so we all had fun listening to the stories of them discovering this new world. I got to talk to my old comp, Elder Liljenquist for a while via Facebook Messenger which was pretty awesome, I was very, very excited to have an opportunity to use my Portuguese, and getting to speak with him was a lot of fun. We talked about the crazy different worlds that we were serving in, and talked about times when I was a horrible companion, and slept through the night while LilJ was violently vomiting. I also got to talk to some of my old friends from Manaus and hear how they were doing. My adopted parents from Manaus and I got to do a video call for a couple of minutes which we were all very excited about. We also got to teach a lesson to the Gebhards tonight. We didn't stay for dinner, but we did enjoy the food that they sent us with, and the chance we had to talk before we had to leave. Then we got to contact our members to finish up the night. It was a great Pday.

10/27/2020

Today was a lot of fun. We got to do a service project with Brother Lewis, and that was definitely the highlight of the day. We were tearing apart his house as quickly as we possibly could, because he had to have it cleared by tomorrow, so where we were sorting things into various different piles before, different groups of stuff to go to different people, tonight we just worked as fast as possible and used our best judgement to sort between "keep" and "trash". That was probably one of the most hectic hours of my life, we moved so quickly, but we did it, we managed to clear out his house in an hour. It was a lot of fun, too, though. He told us some more about his life, his brother's death, the tragedies that had affected his family, and at the end we just told him in a very brief testimony of God's love for Him. That final 30 seconds seemed to have an incredible impact on him, and he sent us some thank you messages later, telling us he wanted to set up a time for a lesson, and of his gratitude for what we had done. It was incredible to see the joy we left him with today, and the hope that was in his eyes.

10/28/2020

Today was the best day ever! I got to go on exchanges with Elder Collins again, and we had another awesome day of memory making missionary service. We did a couple of service projects today, one was at a Uhaul where we worked very fast playing Tetris. We moved everything out of the storage unit as fast as we could, and filled up that truck in the space of about fifteen minutes. The grandpa who was moving himself out was very impressed that we were able to do so much. It was good that we went so fast because we had a lot of lessons today. Collins and I got to teach someone over a phone call lesson and a zoom lesson which was a lot of fun. The phone call lesson had some awkward gaps where we weren't sure if the phone call had dropped or what, we would talk for a bit, wait, not hear anything back from her, and then ask, "are you still there, Sally" to which she'd respond, "oh yes! I was just looking through that scripture you shared again, it sure is a good one". So it wasn't very interactive, but it was still fun. The most fun part of today had to be the other service project we did, though. We went over to this man's house to help him blow out his sprinkler lines before they froze over for the winter, and as we were pulling up Collins said, "I love this dog they have, he's a smart dog, but he's also very dumb" I just looked at him quizzically before he pointed to where the dog was standing next to this pond. The dog started barking wildly as we were pulling up, and after about ten seconds, without any warning, jumped straight into the pond. It was like, 35 degrees outside, it was freezing, and Collins explained it with, "yeah, he recognizes our car, the missionaries were always telling him to jump in, so now he does it whenever he sees us. The dog realized pretty quickly that the pond was absolutely freezing, and so later he would run up like he was going to jump in and freeze there, refusing to jump. I thought he had learned, but the dog still jumped in a couple more times. The part that made today so great though was when Collins and I got to do comp study. We were able to teach each other so much, every time we do exchanges I end up very sad that Collins and I didn't get more time together.

10/29/2020

Today was a good day. Elder Gomez and I got our hopes up that we would have a couple of lessons, but they both fell through. It was kind of disappointing, but at least we got some extra time to try to contact more of our members. We got through like, 20 families tonight, which was probably like, a third of our ward. We also had a combined district counsel today, and I invested a lot more into this one than normal. I talked a lot more about our difficulties, and was much more helpful in answering other's questions than I've been in past times. I'm kind of a rogue missionary, and so I was very surprised of how supportive others were of my answers. I don't know why I thought they wouldn't like what I had to say, I guess I'm just not used to missionaries being so supportive.

10/30/2020

Today we had interviews with President. this was probably the fastest interview I've ever had (ten minutes) but one of the most effective ones, because of how much we were able to get through. I've had a couple of really cool experiences with personal revelation: When I first came out, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I felt months behind where everyone was at, I had no idea what our mission's goals were or what all of the plans that everyone so frequently referenced were. Everything seemed very complicated to me, and I was unsure how I would catch up to everyone. Instead of focusing on everything I didn't have, though, I tried to listen to the promptings of the Spirit, and those promptings led me to work effectively in my area. The things Collins and I would focus on were then the things that the mission would move onto. It was incredible to see that the Spirit would guide us on how to work in our area despite all of our weaknesses. Because of the Spirit, we were able to work harmoniously with our mission. A couple of weeks ago, I felt like it was important to record a video for my Mission President focusing on helping Elders and Sisters to teach with power. It seemed like a weird prompting to follow, but I did it. Then, a couple of days ago, we got the release of what our mission was going to be focusing on for the month of November. It was exactly what I'd talked about. Maybe that exercise was just to strengthen myself, but I asked my President to watch the video I recorded and see if it's something he believes to be equally important for our mission. I might have just signed myself up for a talk in front of ~300 Elders and Sisters. The interview I had with President was also very sweet today. I got a lot more out of it than most other Elders and Sisters were afforded. I was very grateful for the time that President took to talk to me.

10/31/2020

Happy Halloween! We ran around today doing as many service projects as we could. We got to help rake leaves, spear them with pitchforks, take apart tree limbs that fell because of the snowstorm, and clean the bigger pieces to be used as firewood. We also got to teach a lesson to the Hillan family today, they gave us acai, which was an incredible treat. We were told to be home by 6:00 tonight, so at about seven we opened up our garage door, sat their doing studies, and set up a bowl of candy in our driveway for trick-or-treaters to enjoy. Elder Gomez did his studies in the dinosaur costume Brother Lewis gave to us, and that costume was like the lighthouse for trick-or-treaters, they seemed to flock to him. Probably only like, 15 kids showed up, but it was still pretty cool. We also had an opportunity to talk to our neighbors, they thought it was so cool that we as missionaries were trying to do stuff to support the neighborhood, and so we earned a lot of friends tonight. We also got to do a call with our District tonight, which was a fun way to end the spooky day.

11/1/2020

We had a great church meeting today. We actually had a lot of meetings today, and the most important one was probably our Ward Council meeting. We presented a Ward Mission Plan of how we wanted to work better in the area. Generally it's better if the Ward creates this plan, than if the missionaries do, so I tried to do a really good job of having the Ward pick the goals, and then we just helped them make plans about how to do it. Our plans ended up being centered around weekly lessons with the missionaries where the families we're meeting with invite one other family, an active family, less active, or nonmember family. We wanted to focus on maximizing our effort as families in small and simple ways that would push our families, but were still achievable. We got to teach Sunday school to the 12-14 year old class, and a couple lessons to families. One of the families we taught ended up inviting too many people, which was a good problem to have. We gave our district leader a call because the number of people who were there broke COVID rules, but it worked out because the kids left and we were able to do it outside. We also got to walk back from our dinner tonight which ended up being an hour long walk, and brought me a lot of solace, feeling like I wasn't missing out on too much from Brazil.

Today I wanted to share a message that comes from 1 Samuel 16:7, "the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart". Jesus Christ is our perfect exemplar, He teaches us how to see others. It's my promise that as we seek to see others in a more Christlike way, looking on their hearts and seeing them as God does, we'll be blessed to come to know those around us as they really are: Sons and daughters of the most high God.