There are only two weeks left and then it's transfers again. We have a lot of missionaries coming in so the odds of me training are really high, because there aren't enough sisters to go around and the general trend is that every sister trains after their first transfer. That's pretty scary since I'm still not done with my training and I have no clue what I'm doing, but we have 36 new missionaries coming in this transfer and someone has to do it, I guess.
This week we decided to have more of an emphasis on contacting people in the street, because we need to have more people to teach. We actually managed to find someone to teach as well! His name is Josh and in the words of the elders, he's solid. He's 24 and a chem student at St. John's. We've taught him the Restoration and part of the Plan of Salvation and he really seems to be seeking for truth, which is just fantastic. He came to church yesterday for the Primary program, which is the best day ever to come, and he agreed last night to be baptized on the 13th! It's pretty great.
Yesterday, we just ran all over the place. Besides having an investigator at church and all, we went to the Jehovah's Witness church at12:30 with the elders, which was a neat experience, and made it back in time for the ward's linger-longer, where we ate all their food, and then visited a member in the hospital before our lesson with Josh. Brother Stephens is hilarious and should be out soon, but in the meantime someone has to stay with his wife Dotty, so we did that for a few hours this morning. Also, we had the RS broadcast on Saturday, which I didn't know missionaries could go to! I've been reading old conference editions of the Ensign for studies all week, so I'm really excited to see it all next Saturday and Sunday.
I promise I haven't lost ALL my Portuguese; we have a Temple Square missionary from Brazil here and I was able to have a decent conversation with her. Sister Zanella is from a town just a couple hours south of Curitiba, so her accent is pretty much what I'll be learning and her temple is the Curitiba one. She's made me a lot less worried about having to relearn it all, for sure.
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| This is us at a restaurant |
Here's a mission word for you that I've never heard: trunky. I dunno if it's just a Jacksonville thing or a missionary thing or both, but it means homesickness, except not for people who just came out, but for people who are about to go home. So if you're going home in two weeks and all you can think about is home, that's trunky. Yeah, I dunno. Oh, funny story: we were talking to Sister Collins in the ward, who is pretty sick, and we were telling her that we would pray for her. Sister Shumway was wearing a necklace of huge jade beads and was fingering it as she said it and Sister Collins was kind of freaked out because it looked exactly like a rosary. S. Cline and S. Wallentine have a Buddha statue in their apartment, for some reason. It holds all their loose change. We're just all heretics!
I taught a lesson on obedience in Gospel Principles and got to read this great talk by Thomas S. Monson called Obedience Brings Blessings. He talks about how Jesus Christ was a perfect example of obedience, which I guess I'd never really thought about. I know He submitted his will to the Father, but I never thought that He'd really had to make a hard choice, since He already understood His role and purpose. But I guess the biggest way in which He was obedient wasn't by never doing wrong (though He never did), but by never being prideful of His calling or disloyal to his Father. So as a missionary, as a direct representative of Jesus Christ, I need to be obedient to my calling, not just by following all the rules but also by not being annoying and stuck up. There's a real Christlike aspect to obedience that I never considered, which is never deviating, even in your mind, from what you know is right.
Anyway, that's it! love ya!
Anna
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