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!
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