Weekly Update....

Hello everyone,

Como vocês estão?
To be honest not a lot has changed since last week. We were able to meet with Neto this week. Sadly he has moved out of our area so the Elders will start teaching him. I really hope they can get him to be baptized! I gave one of our investigators one of my skirts this week. She kept saying she couldn’t go to church because she didn’t have a skirt. Ha, so I gave her one! Hopefully she will come to church this Sunday.

We have two baptisms planned for Saturday- Adria (age 8) and Jandaerson (age 9). They are really cute kids! We don’t have very many investigators progressing at the moment, but hopefully we will have a few more this week.

We have a new investigator who is really interested in the church. However when we first taught him, he told me he couldn’t understand anything I was saying. That comment hurt a lot! We can’t teach him for a few weeks but it would be cool if we could baptize him.

We had to walk a lot this week. We walked to Centenario which is out in the middle of the jungle. It was cool to see more trees and be away from the city for a little bit. But it is the poorest part of Boa Vista, but the people are so happy there. We only have one investigator there right now. If she doesn’t come to church we are going to stop going out there because it takes most of our afternoon.

Funny stories for the week: I had to give a talk in District meeting on Monday. It was the talk I wrote for last Zone Conference and it was so funny to see all the mistakes I made five weeks ago. I kept saying we need to be effective missionaries at least 10 times. I have to write two more talks for this week. One for Zone Conference about the Book of Mormon and one for sacrament meeting about the mission of Joseph Smith. So this week is the week of talks.

We had two lunch appointments in one day and I almost died. Our second appointment the member kept giving me more food! I felt so sick afterwards. One night we were at Josuelte’s house for a lesson and she gave us sorvete to drink. Well I took one sip and instantly thought it was coffee. Sister Boyack said the look on my face was priceless. She quickly told me that it wasn’t coffee and to calm down. Hahaha. And finally we were teaching Janderson and Adria the Ten Commandments this week. We had to teach them the law of castidade (chastity). I had no clue how to teach that to kids. So I was just listening to Sister Boyack and she said, “Nós não podemos fazer bebés antes casamento.” (We are not able to do bebés before marriage) I started laughing so hard which made her start to laugh too. Ha good times.

I have been thinking a lot about Fé (faith) this week. We helped a family last night with FHE. The Irmã started crying because they are having a lot of financial problems. The lesson we gave was about Fé. After I bore my testimony about Fé (the first time in 8 weeks sister Boyack didn’t correct me on anything, I was way surprised) and I had a strange thought pop in my head- how can you possibly teach people about Faith in Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father, if you are losing faith yourself? I know I will continue to struggle if I don’t have faith! In 2 Nephi 27:32 it talks about faith. It basically says God is ALWAYS the same; we are the ones who change. And miracles happen according to our faith. I really like this scripture and I think we can all apply it in our lives!

Well, I hope you all have a great week. Don’t worry about me I am fine. Oh, I received some cards today: one from you guys with Jen’s baptism program, Shane, Grandpa T, the ward, and Sister Moyle. I am not sure when I will get that fabulous Christmas card, maybe on Friday.

Love you all,
Sister Crystal