Curitiba, Week 4

Hi everyone!

This will be a short one; sorry about that, but bear with me.

We did a lot of finding this week, which hear includes a lot of knocking doors. It´s always intersting to see who lets us in or not. I firmly believe that (as long as the missionaries themselves are humble and obedient) everyone we talk to has the Spirit prodding them to accept us and hear more, so they´re either accepting or rejecting that. Because of this, it doesn´t matter our ability in the language or the way that we extend the invitation to hear about the gospel as long as we´re trying our best to serve the Lord. This way, I don´t worry as much about saying the ´wrong´thing, because everyone has the agency to choose whether to accept us or not. Still, working here is the hardest thing I´ve ever done. Everyone is asking what is the hardest thing: the language, the food, living in another country, the weather. For me, it´s adjusting to a new mission culture, because the way we work is so different from what I know already. But I have a really strong testimony that without obedience, we accomplish nothing in missionary work, and this obedience is both to the Lord and to our mission president. So I´ve expecting to see really mighty miracles in the weeks and months to come. For now, I´m focusing on discovering the smaller ones that occur every day.

We got a new sister this week, Síster Constantino, who´s from Chile. She´s pretty great and we have a lot of fun in the apartment. We may try to speak only English in the apartment this week, which will be exciting.

We had a bit of an adventure on the way to zone meeting this week (we´ve had four of these in the last 3 weeks and no one knows precisely why). We were on a crowded ônibus with about 6 or 7 other missionary companionships and a rather distressed-looking man whipped out a gun and started waving it around. But fortunately he didn´t shoot anyone and we all got off the bus at the next stop, so I don´t know what happened after that. Zone meeting was pretty great; through some miracle of the Spirit I´m always able to understand what President Monteiro says. André brought his parents to church yesterday for his confirmation, which was really neat. We´ll start teaching his mom tomorrow. Anyway, that´s about it for our adventures now; hope everything is going great at home, too! Love you all!

Síster Nielsen