In my ongoing search for an internet cafe that has a way to send and organize my pictures (because my camera is almost full) today i find myself in this grungy bar/café that smells like smoke and has pool and darts and 80's music. Sadly, it does not have a usb jack, and so no pictures this week. However, Priscila (the aforementioned daughter of someone eldernixon's dad baptized) copied a bunch (all) pictures from my camera and is going to send them to you, so find some good ones and stick them on my blog. I think i'm going to buy a new SD card today, my camera is way too full.
So the week was good. It taught me a lot about humility. It was thursday afternoon and i hadn't taught a single lesson this week. I really like teaching, and when i don't have anyone to teach it's frustrating. President Torgan, some time ago, made a new rule that after dinner and lunch we have to take 10 minutes for prayer. At first i thought it was rediculous, and didn't really know how i was going to pray for 10 minutes straight, but as times gone on i've really began to appreciate and rely on these minutes of prayer and revelation, and theres a marked difference in the days when i don't get around to doing it because we don't have time or whatever. Anyway, returning to quinta feira (thursday) with Elder Perkes not having taught any lessons. Earlier that day we went up to Mira-Sintra for the second time. We went there the first time looking for a member and ended up contacting this kid. We marked a appointment with him for thursday. We got there thursday and no one answered. To add to the frustration, it took us about an hour to get there. So we went back to the church, stopping by lidl to buy some cake (lidl is a great store that has almost no comparison in the united stated. It sells a lot of very cheap junk food, including a 1£ lemon cake which is honetly incredble. But you can also by rice or yogurt or meat or backpacks. If they built them in college towns they'd make lots and lots of money. They're also the only place that sells good Duo) So, we ate some cake and prayed. As i was praying, humbling myself and asking that i could teach someone, I remembered this lady we had contacted at the station in Mira Sintra. We were walking out of the station and she smiled at us (which isn't your average reaction when people see the missionaries, staring is normal, smiling is rather rare) and so we talked a little bit, then i asked her for directions and ended up finding out that her nephew used to go to church all the time but didn't anymore. I figured he was a member of the church from the way she described it, and we got their address and it was cool. So, remembering her in the church, i felt like we should go by them then and teach them, so we did, and there were 5 people there, and we had a good, rather distracted lesson. We marked a return appointment with the kid and his friends for the next day. The next day we were talking to him and we found out he wasn't a member, that he had never been baptized because he was baptized when he was a baby and didn't feel like he coud be baptized again. We exaplained a little bit about the importance of the concious decision to be baptized and talked about how babies aren't condemned if their not baptized, and he liked that a lot, and asked us if we could baptized him right then in his house (which reminded me of God's Army 2, if anyone has seen that), but we told him it had to be by immersion and that he needs to prepare first. So. The moral of the story, is that we marked him and his friend for baptism in a few weeks. He's heard all the lessons before and has been to church a bunch of times, hopefully now he's ready to committ.
Iliana didn't end up getting baptized this week, we pushed it back to the 23rd, for a bunch of reasons, partly so that her mom could see it because that's her first day off, but we're excited for that here in a week.
My birthday came and went without a whole lot of ado, i did buy an air popper thing that shot confetti everywhere and some gingerale, and that was fun. It was a good birthday. I'm 21! What's up with that? I still have a hard time believing i'm 20. My age used to feel like a part of me, now it just feels like a somewhat arbitrary number that has very little effect on my life.
Oh, continuing the story, so after that, we ended up finding a bunch of new people and teaching a bunch of lessons and it worked out that this week we taught more lessons than we had in any other week in Massamá and we found more new people to teach than i have in any other week of my mission. So it's cool, humility is really important in missionary work. We found this other kid, Reuben, who was a reference from Eugerindo (the kid who's marked, along with his friend Alex), who is way cool. We taught him a little bit about prayer and he liked it a lot. he 'reza' (i'm not quite sure how you translate that into english, i think it's recite, but it's saying memorized prayers repetitively), but he really liked the idea that he can ask for specific things from God. He was actually one of the smartest kids i've ever talked to about that. Lots of kids when we explain about prayer ask if they can pray to do good on a test, and we have to explain that it doesn't work exactly like that, that we have to do our part too. Reuben asked if he could pray, "God, i have a test on thursday, and i don't really want to study, so please give me the desire to study so that i can do well on the test." That is a wise 17 year old.
Lets see, some other highlights: I met member of the church that looks almost exactly like George Clooney (almost because he also looks a little bit like Robert De Niro)
And lots of other exciting and incredible other things happened, but i don't have any more time left. So have a great week, and have a good mardi gras (here they call it carnival, and it's pretty crazy, they like to throw water baloons at missionaries, but that hasn't happened yet.)
abraços
Elder Ammon
