Parque das Nacoes
No need for cell phones
Going to Church
After the baptism of JosianeThanks for the emails and the pictures! Preston is crazy. I keep thinking that he's going to turn three pretty soon, when in all reality he turned three and then four ALREADY. There's a four year old in our ward, and it blows my mind to think that Preston is as old as him.
So as for novidades this week, I guess I'll start off by mentioning that we had zone conference, and it was my first time attending in the Miratejo chapel (instead of just hanging around and setting everything up). It was pretty weird. I saw the same trainings that the assistants did, plus a training by Elder Croshaw and Elder Florence. It was so good to see Elder Barrett and Elder Wardenburg. Apparently things have gotten crazy with a couple houses since I left, but they're handling it pretty well.
We had a street meeting (basically a bunch of missionaries doing contacts in the same place) in Cacilhas, and for the most part nothing really came from it, but we met a few people and got a couple references.
Afterwards, Elder Corbett and I did our weekly planning, and right from the beginning we started having a bunch of realizations. We drew out all of our investigators and the people they were linked to, then we realized that a lot of our investigators have nobody linked to them that we know. Then, we realized that the MEMBERS had nobody linked to them that we knew of.
It was amazing. It was absolutely incredible what happened. We remembered when Christ came to the Americas and let the multitude come see him one by one, until the entire multitude was converted and worshiped him. We decided we would have to do this too, working on the principle of one by one. In the end, we came up with a plan to go see all of the members individually who would willingly accept a visit. We planned to talk to them about the principle of “one by one” and then ask them if anybody came to mind during the conversation. We'd help them plan an action, (who, what, where, when, why, how), and then check up with them the day after they planned to do it and talk about the next move, what went well, what went not so well, etc. Basically, we're going to teach the members one by one how to help their friends, one by one.
Yesterday, we had our first visit with a member about this, and it was Irmã Lila. She said she had talked to people and didn't feel like she had the Spirit with her enough to talk about the Gospel to anybody, so we helped her individually understand the baptismal covenant better, reviewed the visit of Christ, and then asked her if anybody came into her mind while we had been talking. “HOW DID YOU KNOW?” It turns out she had a friend at work to whom she had given a Book of Mormon, and this friend had questions about Joseph Smith that Irmã Lila didn't know exactly how to answer. It stopped there almost two months ago. So we helped her plan to ask about how her friend liked the reading and what to do depending on her response. We practiced, and we left her with a note with all the who, what, where, when, why, how, with our follow-up time. It was absolutely amazing. And that's just one member.
Sunday was Josiane's baptism!!!!! Do you remember the Josiane I talked about almost a year ago? She has changed so much. She was very quiet, concerned, worried, and confused by a lot of things when I was teaching her. We had a lesson where I taught the basic idea of what happened with me the summer of 2007, how we have to have a true, eternal perspective to be able to understand what we learn. That was what was holding her back from being baptized, and when she bore testimony after her baptism, she talked about how that was what was missing from her life. Once she got that, it changed everything. She's so much happier, so much less worried about things, and knows where to go now. It was absolutely incredible. I've felt like my mission has had so many loose ends – people I met and have no idea what happened to them... and then this from my first few weeks in the country. Insane!
In our finding efforts, we have definitely been guided by the Spirit to a couple people. One night, we decided we were going to go knocking. We started walking, doing some contacts, then felt like it would be better to go down by the Cova da Piedade station for whatever reason. We knocked a couple buildings, nothing, then felt like we should knock the building of a former investigator. We knocked that door first, and it turned out to be and interested guy with questions. We're talking to him tomorrow.
Thanks for your prayers.
I want to talk about something I learned from my studies this morning. I've been studying Moses a little bit during these last few days. I absolutely LOVE the Book of Moses. I read chapters 4 and 5 today, and I was absolutely struck by Cain. He would ask, “Who is the Lord that I should know him?” You can't know the Lord is worth knowing until you get to know Him, and “how knoweth the man the master he hath not served...” etc. But Cain continued like this, and then Satan, of all people, commanded him to make an offering to the Lord. Satan told him to be obedient, more or less. So when Cain gave the sacrifice of his fields (he worked the fields), God didn't approve. Cain got angry. He was being obedient, right? He was keeping the commandment to sacrifice, right? But God didn't approve? The Lord told Cain that he needed to repent first. But Cain stayed angry, wanting his level of obedience to pass. The Lord cursed Cain as a just punishment, and set a mark on him so other people wouldn't kill him. It was such an amazing example to me of the importance of doing things for the right reasons, and the gravity of the first and greatest commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart... soul... etc.” But was Cain done for because he “loved Satan more than God”? I don't think so. If he were, I don't think the Lord would have prolonged his time on the earth, setting a mark on him “lest” anybody finding him should kill him. Working to love is definitely something you have to work for, and I can see through Cain that God knows we can overcome the ways that we love Satan more than God. We can act on faith to trust that the Lord is worth getting to know through serving him. We can act on faith to trust that we should love the Lord, even though we don't know Him as well as we might like.
The Book of Moses is SO COOL. It's so cool how clear the Gospel is when put in the context of the beginning of the world, before things like murder and other kinds of sins and confusions were introduced into the world. Enoch is the man.
The scriptures are incredible!
Be sure not to ask “Who is the Lord that I should know him?” Let's be like Nephi and say, basically, “I don't know the meaning of everything, but I know that God loves His children.” Or like Adam, when asked why he offered sacrifices responded, “I have no idea, except that God told me to.”
SIGAMOS EM FRENTE!
I love you guys.
Elder Lobo
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