This week was really good as we had the whole
week to work in our area! To make the best use of our time we did divisions
with the zone leaders every night. We definitely saw the Lord work some
miracles while we were working, one of them being a teenage girl named Soraia.
She is Portuguese but her parents are from Cape Verde, she is 17 years old and
super outgoing. She decided to come to church with us on Sunday and
she loved it. In the class for the teenagers they were talking about going to
the temple in a month and she leaned over and said, “Hey, can I go to
the temple?” It was a little awkward because I had to tell her that first you
have to be baptized. Then she said, “Okay
let’s talk about that.” So we'll keep teaching her this week and hopefully she
can progress towards a baptism date. Also, I think the biggest miracle was when
we went to talk to Nilton and Paula. We were expecting that the marriage
papers would take about 30 days to get to Portugal, but when we saw them they
were super excited and said that they had a surprise for us. She then told us
that the documents had already arrived in only 6 days’ time. They are getting
married on the 27th of February and the following Saturday they
will be baptized! They are super excited to be baptized and during church they
were talking to all the members inviting them to the wedding and baptism. It
really has been such a great blessing in my life to know Nilton and Paula, I
know they're going to stay strong in the church and will help a lot of people's
lives.
During the divisions we saw Tiago and he
finally let us come in the house. Day by day we help him improve, we actually
got him to walk outside and do a little exercise. We did a service project to clean
his house but unfortunately, he still needs to overcome his fears about going
to church. We're just going to continue working with him little by little and
hopefully he’ll overcome this adversity.
Even though I’ve been in the mission for over
a year-and-a-half now, there are still lots of little funny stories about grammar
in Portuguese. We went to give a blessing to a less active member, and like any
typical person here in Portugal she had like seven names and names that were
really hard to pronounce. So we decide that we were going to write out the
names but she said, “No, no, no, I'll do it.” But the problem was she was
really really old and her handwriting was so bad that it wasn't legible. So
what she wrote was "Carvalho", but I thought it said
"Cavalo" which means “horse”. So in the beginning of the
blessing I called her a horse! Hahah! So the temporal thing I learned this week was that
you definitely need to write out the name yourself when you're going to give a
blessing to someone you don't know.
The spiritual thing I learned this week would
have to be the importance of the temple. I was studying about Jesus Christ when
I found an interesting verse in Isaiah 4:2 that says "In that day shall
the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth
shall be excellent and comely for them that are escaped of Israel." So
what does it mean to be escaped of Israel? It means the survivors that escape
the judgement of God and are cleansed....but how? How can we escape? Only through
the temple can we completely escape the "world". I see how hard it is
for people not having a temple nearby and have felt in my own life missing the
temple. I regret so much not going to the temple as often as I could have.... I
know that when we frequently attend the temple we will be blessed and really
"escape the world". When we go to the temple we are on the right hand
of the Lord. When I get back home I’m going to get a "season pass" to
the temple!
We were in the Algarve today because zone conferences
are starting up. I will be giving a training on how to plan daily and weekly.
Pray for me!
- Elder Herrmann
No comments:
Post a Comment