Só Agua Aqui Em Casa Amerela

Good morning everyone. I'm finally gonna send an early email and not put it off til the last second. I'm actually writing it right now on Sunday because usually Sundays are pretty chill and Pdays are always super busy.

This week we were able to get a lot done and hit some high goals. We started the week off with a bunch of media references and found a couple of families to teach. This week I tried to focus on trying to talk to everyone that I could. I talked to random people on the street, people working on the roads, and even got to give a book of Mormon to a super awesome garbage man. Its was super cool to see the amount of people we can share the gospel to with just putting in a little more effort into talking to the people around you. I also noticed that my energy and overall mood was better because I was opening my mouth and spreading the gospel all day and not just at appointments we have. We ended up finding 30+ people to teach this week and all it took was taking a minute or two to talk with the and teach them a little about the gospel. 

Yesterday Sport and Santa Cruz the two biggest teams in Recife played against each other. We had a ton of members and even the bishop call and tell us to stay home that day because there was going to be street fights. But of course we didn't. Although teaching was hard, the few lessons we did have were awesome and I got to watch a little bit of the game in some of our investigators houses.

Today we had the baptism of Claduia and Mateus. We had been waiting a long time for the to finally decide to be baptized and it finally happened. Today was super spiritual because it wasn't just throwing them in the water after teaching them the bare minimum. We have spent at least an hour a day for almost fifty days in a row at their house. We have taught, prayed, and seen a ton of miracles in their lives. We usually move through teaching people pretty quick because if they dont want to be baptized then we give the chance to someone else, but we stayed with this family for some reason and I'm super glad we did. This family is super important to me and has helped my testimony grow alongside theirs.

One more thing that we did this week was had divisions with the APVs( traveling assistant to the president). There job is to teach and help the younger missionaries in the mission teach better and become leaders. I left to a different area with Elder Hall. Elder Hall is a dawg. He is from Idaho, is going to play baseball in college, and his portuguese sounds like a native Brazilian. Not to mention he's a goon. Safe to say we have a lot in common. We also look super similar so the whole day people asking us if we were brothers and if we were from Germany (because these people have never seen white people with blue eyes). To which we responded yes the majority of the time. We were able to invite a ton of people to church and teach some super spiritual lessons. One of the things that I have noticed is if you are obedient and prepare yourself that the lord with speak to those your teaching. All the older missionaries that are successful are the ones who are obedient and have put the time in to really know their reason for being here. That's my goal for this transfer and my mission. To be the missionary who can speak with the power of the lord.

The spiritual thought that I have this week is actually something I learned from Elder Hall. We studied the difference between 2 different types of confindent missionaries. The first on is the prideful confindent missionary. He uses his past accomplishments, own knowledge of the gospel, and teaches in his own way without leaving a chance to listen and have god speak to the people he is teaching. The second type is the humble confident missionary. He is 100% obedient, listens and cares for the investigators, speaks with confidence gods words but doesnt use his own accomplishments to discredit what the lord has done in his life. It's pretty easy to see that the humble confident missionary will speak with more power and help his investigator stay in the church. While the prideful missionary might baptize as well it is more important to show gods love for the people and truly convert them than to just get people dunked by doing the bare minimum. While this example is with missionaries its the same with people too. We always need to be humble within ourselves, but to be 100% confident in the lord. Because the only thing that is 100% in life is Heavenly Father, Jesus Chirst, and their plan for us.

Sorry this email was kinda long. Shoot me an email. Thanks for all the support and for your examples.

Até próxima semana 

Elder Foster

Google Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/qTTLNZXdZi29Etpa9