Back to the A's

Hey everybody!

I loved the emails this week. Thanks for the update about the BYU blowout. I heard Tulane was supposed to be decent, but I guess that was a mistake. Florida State should be a really cool game -- Elder Golden is going to Florida State when he gets back, so I'm pretty excited to see what happens.

Thanks for the extra money, Dad!

Anyway,

OH MY GOODNESS crazy news:

So this week is transfers, and I found out from Elder Croshaw on Monday that I'm being transferred, but GET THIS: I'm being transferred to the other ward in our building (Ala 2). According to what he told me, Presidente Torgan wants the AP's (Elder Croshaw and Elder Jasche, Brazilian) to have more members to work with. So Elder Hatch is going up to Torres Vedras to "whitewash". I'll be "whitewashing", too. Olivais is being absorbed by the AP's. I'll still be meeting in the same building, but just with the other ward. I'll be switching houses with the AP's, who live right by the Sete Rios train station at:

Rua Filipe de Mata
Nº124, R/C Dtº
1600-073 Lisboa

I'll be serving with Elder Silva, who is from Gaia, up north, and I hear he doesn't speak any English. He's also at least 27 years old, so it will be interesting.

My area will be called "Alvalade", since it includes Alvalade, Areeiro, Campo Pequeno, and some other parts of Lisbon down to Saldanha, west from Entrecampos.

Olivais was my first area that wasn't touching my others, but this new one fills in the gap. (The ward boundaries of Lisbon Ala (ward) 1 and Almada touch each other in the middle of the river.)

I'm much better friends with the members in Ala 2, where I'm going, because more of them come to our weekly ward family night than from Ala 4. This is the ward in which I also play piano on Sundays.

A lot of really weird stuff has been going on with transfers. There are a bunch of areas that are getting "whitewashed" that were doing really well. The financial secretary area is now Amadora (ALL of Amadora and Queluz, which used to have 8 missionaries). There's almost no trace of President Terry anymore, and I still don't understand the necessity of all this change.

I really liked that article that Mom sent me written by Orson Scott Card. I completely agree with him. Since Presidente Torgan got here, we've been getting a ton of pressure to trick members and investigators into giving references to us so we can get baptisms. A lot of stuff we have been taught to do really doesn't sit well with me at all. For example, we're supposed to do the "Family Mission Plan", which is actually where we ask members for names of friends so we can say some special prayer for them, and in so doing we're supposed to get their addresses and start teaching them, too. I haven't been able to stomach that with any member yet.

In the last few months, I've focused a whole lot more on doing unspeakable things (things that aren't just words). It's been cool to develop real friendships with people, members and investigators, but NOT cool to get ripped out of them after just a few weeks. I'm much more focused now on quality than quantity, and I really don't appreciate my environment to be ever more hostile to my behavior. Numbers will never make Portugal a better place to be a member of the church.

What is "the church", anyway? In reality, I see it to be the people. In abstract, it's the doctrine. Like Orson Scott Card said (could somebody do me a favor and see how much it costs to order books in Portugal Portuguese on the internet?), teaching lessons in members' houses isn't what helps, it's the friendship. You could talk about the plan of salvation on the bus with a member and it would still be effective -- it's not like teaching lessons in the member's house is the "key" and then suddenly God takes over and makes the person get baptized because you taught a lesson with some walls around you. There's a view in the mission and in the church here that "that's just how it's supposed to be done", and it's robotic and not real. The push to "be right" and live up to being in the only true church shoves people onto a conveyor belt of lifeless, robotic thought and behavior. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not about being right. It's not even about right and wrong. It's about being happy according to our true natures. Living a celestial life isn't about thinking you keep the commandments better than everybody else, it's about living a life where you would be the happiest forever if you were in the presence of God. Right now, we have bodies and are trying to figure out what in the world to do with them, but we would all be happier if we became more like Christ in nature, not just analyzed his footsteps and tiptoed behind him. The Gospel takes very little analyzation. It's about nature. More than that, it's about finding out what your true nature is. We can often think that the "natural" man, the enemy to God, curses our life into being a game of avoiding evil, but in thinking that way, we may lose sight of having our nature changed towards pursuing what we see to be good by our own free will. Being a member of the church doesn't mean that you give up your agency, like signing a contract and just having to obey to whatever is written (who interprets it, anyway?). You never give up your agency. That's the greatest gift God has yet given us. We're here to learn how to pursue happiness. Life isn't about coloring within the lines, and the church isn't merely a "true" set of lines to color within. It's so much more than that. The church on Sunday is not just to do everything you're supposed to do (classes, sacrament, talks, blahblahblah), it should be a place where you can benefit if you want to. How? According to your answers to that question I asked, serving and being served: Charity, basically. The truth of the church in the abstract is absolute and unchangeable, but the truth of the church in reality depends upon us and how true we are to God, to each other, and to ourselves.

I hope I explained that effectively. I hate words.

Thanks a ton for everything!

Love,

Elder Lobo