A week of miracles!

 Large Plates

A week of miracles! 

Hey everyone!! This week was such a good week! I don't have a lot of time to write, so I'll give you a few highlights:

Okay first, our friend Rosalba is so so awesome. She watched most of General Conference and absolutely LOVED it. She was so impressed by the speakers and the music. She asked who the speakers were so we explained what a prophet is and how we have the same organization as Christ's original church. 

Then, she was interested in how the prophet is chosen. So we just jumped right into the restoration. When we told her about the apostasy, she asked, "So we're still in the apostasy?" To which we answered with an emphatic "no!" God called another prophet named Joseph Smith. She absolutely loved the first vision too. When Sister Peterson said the words of the first vision, I could feel the spirit so strongly and I could tell Rosalba was touched by it too.

We ended off by reading Moroni 10:3-5 and sharing our testimonies about gaining our own witnesses of the truthfulness of the bom. She told us it was cool to hear our experiences to know that what the scripture says can really happen! She was literally writing down the scriptures we read to her to study later. In the end she also asked about baptism, without us even bringing it up!! I'm really excited about her. It was also so good to feel the spirit confirming so strongly the truth of what we were teaching. Sometimes it can be easy to fall into a routine and become numb to the spirit, so when we get that fresh witness & testimony, it's always really refreshing. 

We're also teaching this cute Colombian family. We've met the mom, Juliana, and her 3 kids! She has twin boys (13) and a little girl (9ish) and they are darling. One of the twins is so smart and he answers our questions so thoughtfully. I'm really excited for them too. 

We also had interviews this week! It was so good to talk to President, and he had some good advice and some high praise. I also mentioned to him that I would love to serve in Portuguese work, even though I still don't speak much portuguese. I told him not to feel like he has to do it, and to only do it if he really feels like that's what needs to be done. I thought he might shrug off my idea & say that if I already speak spanish, that's where I should be. But instead, he got really excited! He thought it was cool that I wanted to push myself and keep learning and growing. And He said having more Portuguese missionaries in the mission would be a huge blessing. So that's exciting! I don't think that will happen this next transfer, because the transfer starts next week. Plus, I do want to stay in this area a bit longer because there are so many good things happening! So, we'll see, I guess!

The last thing I wanted to share is a huge miracle we saw! It's kind of a long story, so I'll give the condensed version to the best of my ability. Basically, someone we have been teaching, her name is Mayra, told us she has a friend that goes to our church. We didn't recognize the name that she told us, Mariana, so we were very confused.

Then, one day this week we were trying to visit an inactive member, but they weren't home. We didn't know why we were in the area, but we figured Heavenly Father had a plan for us. So, we started looking to see who was in the area that we could visit. We didn't think Mariana was in our areabook, I swear I looked it up before. But we were looking at our options and I saw her name! I freaked out!! We were looking at her record and we saw her daughter's name–Francesca. We realized that Mayra's daughter had a friend over earlier this week and her name was Francesca. It was the same Mariana!! 

We knocked on their door and they let us right in! We got to know them and they told us it was a huge miracle that we had come at that time. Earlier that day, they had been talking about how fortunate they were to have Sundays off, and how they needed to be better at decimating their time to God. They decided together that they were going to start coming back to our church the next Sunday. We got to know everyone there and they all were really grateful for our visit, and all really open to coming to church, English class, and having us come over every week! Anyway, long story short, they are really awesome and I can't wait to keep teaching them!!

Small Plates

The God of Abraham

I mentioned in a previous email that as a missionary we are studying a few topics in preparation for our mission tour (this week!) One of the topics, the one that has most captured my attention is that of the Abrahamic Covenant. I have learned so much about it, which makes sense because before this month I would say I knew relatively nothing. I have a lot of things I could share, but I'll just share a couple little things I thought were cool.

In the book of Mormon, it often refers to Jesus Christ as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." Every time I read that, I like to think of it as "the God who promises, the God who Provides, and the God who prevails." I don't have time to articulate why I think of it that way, but I invite you to ponder about that this week!