Week 41 - 27 June 2011 Eleitos!

Hey everyone!  This week went by pretty quick, and it doesn’t feel like too much happened haha.  We went to the farm again to do another service project, which we’ll be doing every Wednesday to help them out.  It was great.  We always get a lot of rain and sun while we’re out there. 

We ended up walking a ton this week, but tons of appointments that we set up fell through.  Yesterday at church was the first ward conference here in Capanema, so we had tons of people and less active members come.  This little house was packed with 120 people.  Elder Farias and I didn’t even get to watch conference cuz there wasn’t enough room haha.  But we got a lot of references and have some good people lined up for baptism this coming month.  One of the ladies is 87 years old and lives on a farm pretty far away.  So we’re gonna go teach her and baptize her on the 3^rd of July.  I’m thinking we will have to go to a nearby river around here to baptize her cuz I’m pretty positive that she won’t be able to climb in and out of the font we have here.  We also set up an appointment with a lady that saw us on the street during the week.  She saw how happy we were and wanted to feel that happy too.  She was too scared to talk to us, but she saw us go into a member’s house for lunch.  Then after lunch she went up to the members that live there and asked what church we went to.  She miraculously went to church on Sunday and liked it a lot, so we’re gonna teach her and hopefully baptize her too.  People that really have the desire to follow the Lord are the people that we really need to be looking for.  And in Portuguese we have a word for these kind of people, we call them ELEITOS! haha.

In my reading of the Book of Mormon this week, I was reading a lot about when the people of Alma reunite with the people of Mosiah and of Zarahemla.  A lot of the people start to do a lot of iniquity, and Alma turns to the Lord for help.  Some things that we can learn from this part of the Book of Mormon are that when we need help in something, we need to turn to the Lord to see what we should do.  As a missionary of the Lord, this is especially important to comprehend and put into practice.  It’s something that I’m working on here.  And one thing that the Lord said to Alma was about the repentance of his people, and that every single person has the opportunity to become clean again because of the infinite atonement of Jesus Christ.  A little later on in the story of the Book of Mormon, you can really see this apply to the son of Alma and the sons of Mosiah.

I hope you guys are having a good time all alone at home.  I’m doing great here, and I’m glad Rio’s doing great in the MTC too.  I don’t have too much to say this week, but no worries cuz I have a lot of pictures!

Love you guys!

Élder Andrus

The church house in Capanema

Working on the farm

Loro!