BOM DIA MUNDO!!! what a week of craziness. We started off the week going to the other island to do some divisions with the other elders and as usual our flight got delayed a couple of hours. We did our first division with the elders of Angra and I was with Elder Burke who is a newer missionary from Hawaii and played on the BYU rugby team. We really clicked and got along great! Sometimes here in the Azores you can get really sad or feel unmotivated because it can be really hard at times. We wanted to help change it all up and help them feel motivated and hopeful! We divided into teams and set up a little game to see who can get the most lessons and new investigators. The losers had to buy ice cream for the winners at the end of the night. So Elder Burke and I were running all around the city, talking to everyone, trying to teach someone. We taught this guy named Bruno who didn't believe in God and by the end of the lesson was considering baptism!! What a miracle! At the end of the day we needed to find at least one more person so we started running up this big hill knocking on every door before 9:00 pm--our deadline! I am not joking we were RUNNING, way too competitive and not wanting to lose! We got to the top of the hill and not one person wanted to hear our message. The other elders WON we were so mad hahaha but we were good sports...and Angra has 2 baptisms coming up because of that day!
We then returned to our island and had a 4 hour lay over in the airport-- so yeah that was fun. Graça and Samira said that they are ready to be baptized but want to push it off. We know satan is working on them. We haven't been able to talk since Thursday so we'll have to see what happens. We will do everything we can to help them. Our other Graça has had a lot of work so she couldn't meet with us or go to church so we needed to postpone her baptism. But we are still planning to baptize Inês this week! We need to focus on the things we can control and have faith about the things we can't--that everything will work out.
So a weird story, we had a member call us and tell us that he spoke to the second councilor in the mission who said that we can bless a union of this couple who are this member's friends. We went and talked to this couple that was going to get married to see what they wanted us to do...but they weren't getting married legally they were just "getting married without the commitment by the law." So they asked us if we could bless their relationship. I felt pretty sketchy about it but the member kept assuring us. We ended up calling the mission and they said absolutely NO! It was super stressful!
The temporal thing I learned this week was to always bring something that you can do at an airport because your flight may be 4 hours late.
The spiritual thing is that as missionaries we aren't here to just baptize. We are here to help people come unto Christ in anyway they can. Yes, that means baptism if they want to follow his commandments, but sometimes it is in the little every day ways. We are like farmers--planting seeds and one day, hopefully, a lot of the seeds we planted some other missionaries will find have grown into plants that are ready for harvesting (baptism). I am happy to be here helping the kingdom of God grow. It truly is the best thing I have ever done in my life!
Love you all!
-Elder Herrmann
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