February 4, 2013

HEY GENTE,

So first off, I TOTALLY spaced about the super bowl...heck I can’t even remember what day is Valentine’s Day.  It’s funny how "out" of everything you really get on the mission!

Last Tuesday we had the AMAZING privilege to hear Elder Bednar speak to our whole mission and well it was PHENOMENAL! I don’t think I will ever be forgetting that one. The whole three hour conference was essentially just like a huge example of how we should teach our investigators because he let us "lead" or decided where the meeting was gonna go and what were our major questions that we always wanted to ask an Apostle. Also, he was hilarious! I was expecting him to be super serious but he has some pretty solid jokes :) very impressed. At the same time I don’t think I’ve ever learned so much in three hours in my life, I was very impressed. We TRUELY do have people called of God that talk with Him and pass His will to all of us. In this meeting and the last one we had with Elder Cook, in the ending testimony of them you can just feel that they sincerely KNOW God and Jesus Christ. Wow this church is true. But then after that meeting we had Elder ____ "son" (the person he was training) felt like he had some stuff that he still needed to work out but never did before the mission so to make a long story short he was interviewed by the Pres and ended up going home on Friday; it was a rough day. I only knew the kid for four weeks but the fact that he had to go home REALLY bummed me out. Tears may have been shed and prayers may have been said and well everything will all work out.  Some other big news ____ a kid in our ward got his mission call this week too and he is going to missão belemixi, the jungle baby! We found that out on Sunday and ended up getting a new bishop too! But well last week was a little rough because almost all of our appointments fell and nothing seemed to work out and Elder ____ went home but the conference with Bednar was amazing! So onto this week real fast!

Tuesday we had some SUPER good lessons with this family that we found last week and with ____ about Alma the Youngers repentance process and some other solid lessons, it was the day we had district meeting and Elder ____ gave the training this week and it was great and I bought another Elders shoes because he is going home in three months and the shoes are essentially new and actually water proof and legit!  Make sure Michael gets ecco shoes for his mission.  But then I sent my package home which ended up being R$154 which is $72 bucks, ouch and I bought the shoes from the elder for R$120 reais which is only $60 bucks which is a WAY good deal because they are worth $140 but then some other big highlights for the week would be that we FINALLY connected with ____ again who is the mom of the some kids that are members. We taught her once like two months ago but never connected with her again because she works like crazy and well we connected with her this week and well we had some SUPER spiritual lessons and she should be good to go for the next month!  On Thursday, ____ came from Diadema because it’s pretty close to Sao Bernardo and he stuck with us for like four hours teaching people and so that was super sweet being able to chat with him again and he said that he felt like the stuff that we taught for our investigators was for him so that was a sweet day. Then the rain from hell came back on Saturday and we got stranded standing on some benches at a bus stop for half an hour because it was raining so hard that the streets flooded all the way to the bus stop...ugh. I would rather be freezing my butt off then taking on the miserable hot humid downpour of São Paulo! Yesterday we had stake conference and actually had four investigators there and it was super spiritual so that was fantastic and today we went to the institute building as a district and we had a BBQ that didn’t turn out as good as I was hoping because I’m feeling a little sketch as of right now but there was foosball and air hockey and pool and ping pong so we just spent the whole day messing around there.  But well that wraps up the week.... another week in Brazil!

I love you all, thanks for everything! I hope everyone is just doing great and I’m still waiting for all of those letters promised at Christmas....hmmmmmm....

com amor,

ELDER GUBLER