ELDER vs. WILD

I've been slacky posting Christian's emails! Here's his latest one....he's almost done! He'll be home Dec 22. Holy cow!

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Hey everybody!

Holy goodness! I loved today's emails. It's good to see that thanksgiving went well on all sides of the world and that BYU still had a puff of steam to beat Utah. I had no idea I was flying home with Coombs! Cool stuff. I loved the pictures of Preston -- it's good to know he's finally let chocolate into his life. Tough luck with the corolla, Dad. I'm not complaining, though. It'll be weird being in an automatic. I've only seen two or three of them here. (I still haven't received my portuguese driver's license...)

Well, this last week, we all had interviews on Wednesday, and overall everything went pretty well. We had family night Friday night, which turned into another coloring party -- we had Mo Tab Christmas music playing and colored a bunch of different things. The idea was to draw your favorite scripture story and share how it has helped you along in life, and there were great drawings from Jesus walking on the water to the tree of life, but a couple people must not have been paying attention and drew aliens attacking New York City and a tornado sucking up a cow. It was really fun.

Saturday morning, I woke up pretty sick, so we stayed in. I slept forever, took good care of myself, drank lots of liquids, blah blah blah so don't worry. I wasn't better Sunday, either, so I decided not to risk terrorizing anybody with the notion of Gripe A (swine flu) having them see me sick. I didn't have any chills or fever or anything, so I'm pretty sure it was just your run-of-the-mill disease. Here I am today... functional, coherent, wearing a scarf (because it's not femmy to wear scarves here), and enjoying the relatively frigid weather.

Oh -- our thanksgiving here was rather pathetic (but I prefer the term "simple"). We got together with the elders from Costa da Caparica and had Stove Top stuffing, mashed potatoes, pão de queijo (which is grounds for starting a pão de queijo tradition for thanksgiving), and chicken parts that totally didn't work out. We went to go do some "thanksgiving", as Ariana had mentioned to me, and we went visiting some members. That was when we ran into a guy named Manuel who joined the church several years ago but ended up letting day-to-day life get the best of him. Now that he has kids, it's kind of snapped him back into reality, and he supposedly went to church yesterday and brought his kids with him (I don't know -- we weren't there...). Moral of the story: no matter how busy you are, working to make your life worthwhile takes some reprioritization.

It's crazy to think that this is my fourth-to-last P-day, and everybody keeps telling me "you're the one that's going home, so we'll do whatever you want to do," but I have no idea what else to do here in Lisbon. We went to Palácio de Ajuda last week and also saw an art museum inside, and it was pretty cool, but a little ridiculous. I'm getting pretty desperate to find cool things that I haven't seen yet. I'm still not sure what's going to happen during my last two weeks (a new transfer starts two weeks before I leave), and we know that more missionaries are going home this time than coming in. Hopefully I don't have to move anywhere because a wheel on one of my bags busted off this last time -- it's the cobblestone -- it's like dragging your luggage down the stairs no matter where you walk.

I read Acts while I was sick on Saturday, and it was pretty cool to read at this point in my mission. I remembered times when I felt like I was right there with Paul. I got a completely different perspective of the rest of the New Testament -- those epistles seem like their weekly emails home. Not to try to compare myself with them or anything, but I wonder if they fail to write down as much stuff that happens as I do. There's a lot of stuff that I don't even know how to record. It's cool to have the apostles back nowadays.

It's weird being with missionaries that have so little time in the mission. If I mention anything about what I'm going to do when I get home or anything, they all instantly start daydreaming, and I instantly start laughing. No matter how much or how little results from my time here in Monte da Caparica, it would be good to know I had a good effect on them.

Anyway, rock on, everybody. I love you guys.

Beijinhos

Elder Lobo