March 26, 2012

I think I already gave everyone the run down of one of our investigators.  We have been focusing a lot on her lately because really she has such an amazingly strong testimony that really came out of no where! It has been such a testimony builder to be able to see her grow in the church when it felt like we hadn’t done that much but then again we aren’t doing anything. It’s the Lord working through us.  But the one problem with her is that she really wants to be baptized but she is afraid that she may go back to her old life at some point because she has a kid and I don’t really know a lot about her past but we have been trying to focus on the present with her and how if and when she is baptized because we know she will be its just a matter of time that she will get the help she needs to stay on the path the Lord wants her too. But essentially she still hasn’t picked a date yet but we are banking on General Conference doing the trick because if there is one person you can always rely on to get things done it’s the prophet.  I’m pretty excited for general conference!  We get to watch it in English so that will be amazingly nice to be able to hear my own language spoken well from someone besides my comp.  We do have one investigator that really is pretty close to fluent though so that is cool to be able to talk to him about the church in English!  Everyone always says that they don’t want to go English speaking for a mission and don’t get me wrong I LOVE it here in Brazil and I know this is exactly where I am supposed to be but being able to teach in English would be EXTREMELY nice. 

Oh another kind of random thing that happened this week is I found out that I am part of a "church experiment", exciting right?   We got a call from the secretaries this past week which is exciting enough but they asked for me which was a little nerve wrecking.  They went on to say how I have been selected to be part of this church experiment that my district in the CTM is apparently one of the last to stay there for 9 weeks and how they are gonna start only keeping people there for 6 now or something so I have to go to the mission office building and take an Portuguese test to see if 9 or 6 weeks is more effective, no pressure.  We'll see how that goes and I guess ill be able to find out actually how good my Portuguese is which I’m a little nervous about it.

Another thing for the week is we had our first transfer this past week which means our first zone meeting with all of the new people was this week!  It feels like our zone got a ton bigger now but we did get a new area opened up and our district got moved around so that is pretty exciting in itself but we got an Elder from the Baixada which sounds really nice by the way! They have couches and stuff in their area but everyone says it is MEGA hot and kind of tough for the work because it’s by the beach so everyone there is on vacation and doesn’t actually live there but that’s beside the point!  We got a new Elder, Elder Brown who played for BYU football so I felt pretty cool talking to him! The people you meet on your mission you get oddly attached to so lets hope I can stay tight with him ;)

Another random story really quick because I'm almost out of time is I talked to Jehovah Witnesses missionaries this week.  We were at the bus stop and there were two old ladies that I was just talking to but they gave me magazine pamphlet things and all this stuff and I realized that they were missionaries so that was exciting and the magazine things they gave me were pretty interesting.  They were called ‘Is it possible to be honest today’ and ‘Does God cause natural disasters’ so I had a good time reading those.

But that’s gonna have to be it for the week! I love you all so much and keep the emails coming.  Hopefully next week I’ll have a little more time to email!

Com todo de meu coração, ELDER GUBLER