Lindsay, CJ

It was a great, quick, week.  Without a doubt, the highlight of the week was the opportunity we had to baptize Ana Luiza. We met her a couple of weeks ago when her cousin, one of the people we were teaching, introduced us. She read everything we invited her to read, accepted our invitation to pray and seek a confirmation, received a testimony, and was excited for her baptism yesterday. It was such a cool meeting; about half of the ward showed up and participated. The young women even sang "I am a Child of God" while the leader and her daughter played the recorder afterward. I kind of left a cliffhanger in my last email about this transfer, but here is what is going to happen: I will go to an area on he coast - Totóia, Maranhão - where missionaries have only been for about 3 weeks. I will start my travel at 11:30 tonight and will arrive there sometime in the afternoon tomorrow. There are 10 church members there as of now (3 of whom were baptized yesterday) and they were able t...

How's it going everybody ? It's crazy to think that it's already been another week and that I'm already sending another email out! As always, I've got to start off with the miracles that we saw here in the not-so-little-any-more group of Itapecuru, Mirim.  This week we had the incredible opportunity to welcome 7 new members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through baptism, and as always, I was just so grateful to have played a part in it. To start off, Josélio, Marilene, and Vinicius are a family that I had known for a long while. Due to some error in the Church's system, Josélio had shown up as a member that was baptized in Palmas, Tocantins, in 2001. We went to visit with him, though, and discovered that the day of the baptism he had missed the bus and the missionaries had moved away soon after. He moved to Itapecuru where the Church did not exist yet and stopped there.  We tried teaching him, but opportunities to do it never appeared because...

I've got to keep this one quick because of lack of time (once again), but the hard work keeps on trekking down here in Brazil.  Unfortunately I have to start by saying we were unable to help anyone enter the waters of baptism this week, but we still got out to do a whole lot of teaching, preaching, and inviting. It's the rainy season down here by the equator and it definitely shows. Every day this past week, and about four days of the last, it has rained on us. Umbrellas aren't really worth it, either, because of the wind and the fact that we race walk everywhere, so we end up just being soaking wet with a smile on our faces. Every time it does rain, however, I get to look forward to hearing Elder Simão sing "I'm singing in the rain" in English, so that's always fun for sure. This week we had two conferences: stake and zone. They were both great. I've gotta gotta cut this one short because I just learned I will have a surprise transfer here in a few da...

Boa tarde a todos, No, I didn't die. No, I didn't forget about you all. I've just had a crazy couple of weeks, and I'm now going to try to recap it all as quickly as possible. My new companion, Elder Simão, and I stayed a companionship for about 4 days before becoming a trio. Elder de Souza is also a Brazillian native who only has about 3 months left in his mission, but he is still going strong. We've been doing a lot of hard work and have seen some incredible blessings as a result. My area at first consisted of two wards - Uruguai and Taquari - but has since grown to 5: Uruguai, Taquari, Pedra Mole, Cidade Leste, and Cidade Jardim. That means we are now covering what I believe is all of Zona Leste (East Zone) of the city of Teresina. Needless to say, that's a whole lot of ground and people to cover. Since I last emailed, we have been able to baptize 5 people, and each one of them has been a miracle. One of the folks that we baptized - Kamile - has been particul...