Letter #94

"O fim dos tempos está chegando!  O fim dos tempos está próximo!"

There's some crazy guy that always yells this at us when he walks past us.  I guess he doesn't understand what it means that we're from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  But whatevs.

This week was good.  I used all of my creative juices last night writing in my journal, so I'm just gonna type it up for you.

"These last few days have been some great ones.  I only have things to be grateful for.  Let me describe some of the missionary marvels thtat we had these last couple days.

We went to Araraquara yesterday night.  It was super weird going back to my old area and house.  We got to the house before the ZLs, so we took the liberty of stopping by Evelin's house.  When we were walking up to the house Evelin's mom was outside talking to the neighbor.  She saw me, but, not realizing who I was, continued talking with the neighbor.  When she finished, she turned to talk and was surprised to see that I'd come back to Araraquara.  She couldn't help herself and attacked me with a hug.  Apostasy.

It was a good visit.  It was a friendly gesture and I'm sure they won't forget that I didn't forget about them.

We went to the house after that, bought the pizza that we always to buy, and then prepared the training for the zone.

This morning we started off bright and early.  The training was good; nothing out of the ordinary, and I ended up leaving a little bit unsatisfied.  I felt like we weren't every inspirational, but we prepared as much as we could, so watta-ya-gonna do.

So, we bumped into a few people today.  And it definitely wasn't a coincidence.  The first group of friends that 'accidentally' found out that I was in Araraquara was Assis, Carmelita, and Isabela
(two investigators and a recent convert that live in a neighboring city).  They called Elder Magalhães in the middle of the training asking if they could meet up with me for lunch.  When I asked them how they found out that I was in Araraquara, they said that one of Assis's coworkers saw me on the bus and told Assis.  A likely story.

I also ran into Inês and her two daughters downtown.  Not a coincidence, they said that they were planning on visiting the church these days.  Hopefully I was a good influence and they end up going.

When we went to catch the bus to go to Matão we saw Marcelo, an elderly man who goes to church there.  He was going to baptized; I did his interview and he didn't pass.  He's been chilling in Matão ever since and no one was able to baptize him.  We had a nice long conversation on the bus about how all languages need to be reformed to agree so that the orthography and phonetics agree.

I went on an exchange with Elder Borup, which was really great.  My dissatisfaction that I felt after the training went away  when I was able to sit and have a one-on-one with with Elder Borup.  we had a lot of fun and I made a new friend.

We visited Sandra today.  She's and investigator that's going to be baptized next week.  I taught her once when I was zone leader here and the lesson was so spiritual that she never forgot.  Today I committed her to never, ever miss church on Sunday.  These last couple of days were great."

Much love.  See ya in two (weeks).

Jack