India in Brazil

We´re were supposed to have a baptism this week. The guy, whose name I think I said was Albert (not his real name, but I´m not allowed to use real names) is super super great. We´ve only been teaching him for 2 weeks, but we had to push back his baptism because last week he didn´t stay for Sacrament meeting, and it´s a church rule that every convert has to attend SAcrament meeting twice before baptism. So this Sunday for sure is gonna be his baptism!

The hardest thing with investigators here is getting them to GO TO CHURCH. I literally sometimes cannot understand why they´re not awake when we show up at their house at 8:30. Like, we literally have been visiting you every day and you´ve been telling us every day that you´re gonna go, so why didn´t you set your alarm? They´re such great people of faith here, super open to hearing our messages, but that´s the one caveat. They don´t follow through sometimes.

Have I talked about lunch? We have almoço (lunch) with a sister in our ward every day. And apparently this specific ward is better than average. Which I totally believe, because man I´ve had some great food. And the legends are true. They ALWAYS tell me to eat more. Like, I can only fit so much rice inside of my stomach. And then they always have dessert. YUM.

On the subject of food though, I am literally always hungry. I eat as much as I possibly can every day at lunch, but I´m always hungry about 2 or 3 hours later. And in the morning, I eat 3 or 4 pieces of french toast or fried eggs and yogurt, and I´m starving about an hour later even though we´ve just been studying. Our little budget, after bus passes and other stuff, doesn´t have a lot of room for tons and tons of food, so I do what I can. But this is weird, my metabolism was never like this before. Must be all the walking.

So yesterday, we were super frustrated because we only had 1 investigator in our Sacrament meeting. None of the companionships in our district had met the 5-person standard, so our district leader challenged us to find enough people in time to make it to a meeting across the area at 2pm. We tried our darndest, but couldn´t get 4 more people. It seemed like everyone was out of town or not em casa. So while we were running around, we were just praying “Heavenly Father, please give us a miracle.” And then nothing happened and we didn´t have enough people to go. But later, we were at a ward activity, and towards the end this woman came into the room. Not a member. She said she saw the light and decided to come in. She said that she was wanting to find a church that could show her how to be closer to God, and she wanted to know the answers to questions like “where will I go after this life?” She was basically describing exactly our role as missionaries. So we got her address and plan to visit her this week. She´s gonna be baptised, I can feel it. Then we went out to work, and I had this feeling we should visit a girl who we contacted on the street last week. We knocked on her door and her cousin who lives there opened the door. And he was like “Just a sec,” and went to ask his wife when we could come back. When he returned to the door, he instead invited us in, and there was the whole family there! We got to know them, talked about Jesus and what it means to really follow him, and left after scheduling to come back later this week. This is a great family. I´m excited to teach them.

So here´s my little tidbit for today. You can pray all you want, with tons of faith, but sometimes God will answer your prayers differently than you think or want. But he literally ALWAYS knows best, so we need to just trust him. We´re going to the temple this week, and I´m really excited about that.

I love you all and hope you´re doing well!

Sister West