Week 51 - Goals and blistered hands in Marambaia

Service opportunity!

Hello!!

So this was a good week! We really worked hard this week and got a lot of things done. We ate lunch 3 times in our house this week. Sometimes the members can't make food for us so they give us money and we buy our own food. So we did that 3 times! It was cool.

So we have been struggling a little bit this month. Haven't really found good investigators but we have been working super hard. I've never really liked goals and numbers when doing missionary work. I felt like when we made goals to get this many contacts or lessons we were treating God's children like numbers and sort of working for the wrong reasons. But this week I learned the importance of goals. We make goals for the key indicators in preach my gospel. These key indicators are inspired by God to help prepare people for baptism. If we have good numbers for the key indicators, we will have more baptisms. We work hard to fulfill our goals because we know that reaching our goals will help God's children. After 1 year I finally realized that. And we worked super hard this week to reach all of our goals. We were running around like crazy at 8 o'clock at night trying to reach all of our goals before the end of the day, and we saw the results. We were able to bring 4 people to church yesterday and 3 of our investigators are progressing very well. We really saw the blessings of setting and achieving goals this week.

It's summer break here and everyone is traveling on the weekends so it is really hard to bring people to church. Last week out district brought 1 person to church - 4 areas only brought 1 person!!! So we made goals and plans as a district this week and did LOTS of fasting and praying. And yesterday, the district brought 10 people to church! We can always do better, but I sure love seeing progress!

We are teaching one guy who loves to talk. He really talks a lot, but he is super smart. He has been to lots of churches and tells us everything he sees wrong with them and how things should be. And then when we tell him about our Church everything kind of clicks with him! We are also teaching a 15 year old young man. He has already been taught by some other missionaries. We had a really spiritual lesson with him and he is reading and praying and going to church - really searching for an answer. 

We taught a lady 2 weeks ago. She listened to the message because she "never rejects a word of God" but she didn't seem very interested. Two Saturdays ago we went back and she hadn't read or prayed. We tried to mark another day to come back and she said only Saturdays. We almost took her off the teaching list because she wasn't showing much interest or putting forth any effort. But Saturday we passed by just to see how she was, and she was waiting for us. During the week she read the pamphlet we left with her and prayed and felt she received an answer. She asked for a Book of Mormon and we gave her one. She even cried during the lesson. She said she has lots of little pamphlets in her house from other churches but she never had a desire to read any of them. But when we taught her the Restoration, she felt a huge desire to read and pray. It was one of the best lessons I have had on my mission. To literally see a person change so much in 1 week because she read and prayed. We saw lots of blessing like that this week.

Saturday, we were walking on the street at like 2 o'clock and a member stopped us. She said she needed some help at her house. We went to help thinking it would be a little project... We got there and saw a mountain of dirt in the road. They are doing work on their house and were throwing all this dirt inside to make a new floor. Just the lady and her husband and their 2 teenage daughters hauling all that dirt. So we started helping and finally finished about 7:30 Saturday night. My entire body is sore and I have blisters all on my hands! But it was good to help them. And they fed us.

Thats about all that happened this week, love yall!!

ELDER GREEN

MISSÃO BRASIL BELÉM

MISSÃO DE MACHO. NEM O VENTO É FRESCO.

Tired after moving dirt!

Lunch appointment last week!

They stopped by a birthday party and left with a gift!