From Elder Lobo

Hey everybody!

Thanks for the emails and everything, once again. Thanks for the dinheiro! I'm really excited to get some good keepsakes. I got a book for myself for my birthday called "Lisboa Panoramas". It's a picture book, basically, but it has a ton of pictures I tried really hard to take but couldn't because of my camera and not being able to take pictures while proselyting. It's a really good flavor of the Lisbon I know, and I've been to all the places in the book but two or three. You can even see the house in Almada in a few pictures! It's cool. I'm also thinking about getting some custom azulejos done, and I'm thinking I'll get the Greg Olsen Lehi's Dream done.

Elder Hatch deixou de ser teenager today. We're having a churrasco at the chapel and playing some super awesome volleyball (we're not allowed to play soccer anymore).

Oh, last week we went to Belém for P-Day and went to the Ultramar memorial. It looks REALLY COOL. Look it up. I don't know exactly what the battle of ultramar or whatever was, but they made a memorial for it with the names of all the people that died. There were only two people with the name of Lobo, and only one had it has his last name: Manuel Pereira Lobo, and he was a 1st Sargeant. I got a picture with his name on the wall.

The work has been really slow here thanks to a lot of different factors. A lot of our members are still on vacation (along with the rest of the city) and it's been really hard to find people that aren't tourists. But we've been trying to get creative. There's a ton more pressure for numbers now with Presidente Torgan than with President Terry -- we didn't have any baptisms as a zone this week, so we're supposed to baptize somebody this Saturday. We're looking...

My plans for tomorrow include going out to lunch with António Fragoso from Almada (he works in Parque das Nações at the courts), teaching the mother of a recent convert, and eating dinner with a member family I haven't met yet (they just got back from vacation).

In reflecting over the year, I remember how I felt on my birthday last year when I played tennis. It was one of the few times I had felt like a real human being on the mission. It's been a gradual process breaking out of the robot personality that was infused into me at the MTC, and now the phrase in Preach My Gospel that basically says that sharing the gospel will come more naturally in relationships of care and trust, or something like that. I can't do robotic missionary work anymore, and even though my numbers aren't as inflated as they used to be, the effects I have been producing are much more real and lasting. We've had a lot of pressure recently to get numbers, and it's been pretty frustrating for a lot of people. The best thing about being a missionary is being a genuine human being with other people. Slapping on a fake smile doesn't convince anybody.

Well, I'm running out of time and I can't remember everything I was going to say, but I hope everybody has a wonderful time and that everything goes well.

I hope everybody follows Christ because they want to, not just because they're supposed to. (I'm the post man, doin' what I'm 'post to!)

Abraços!

Thanks for everything!

Elder Lobo