Elder Lindquist 3/4/09

Hello all thanks for the emails, sounds like you guys are doing great and had a fun time at grandpa's birthday party. (By the way Grandpa B happy birthday! ou feliz aniversário!) sorry anyone else who had a birthday and I haven't done a shout out I don't know all these things.. Well this last week was pretty good, but it was a little slow. We had to go to évora for a couple of days and then when we got back Elder Hansen was sick so we didn't get a lot of work done here in Beja. This weekend we have zone conference in mirateijo, I love zone conferences they're awesome and spiritually uplifting. A lot of times it's easy to allow yourself to slip into the blues because no one wants to listen to you but zone conferences help lift the spirits. I especially enjoyed Elder Bednar’s visit a couple weeks ago. He's so straight forward I love it, he has inspired me to be more bold with the less actives here, (still being sweetly bold of course) but just giving it to them how it is ya know. The night before he talked to us they had a meeting with members and investigators, people came from all across Portugal to see him so the chapel was packed. I guess it was a question answer type deal and a young man asked Elder Bednar what significance a mission had for him and the other young men there. Elder Bednar responded, you would be betraying yourself if you did not serve a mission. You would miss out on blessings and would be withholding blessings from other people’s lives. I thought that was pretty neat. Missions are awesome and will bring blessings to your life and the life of your future family. I know I would have been betraying myself if I had not come on this mission. So last night we had our first English student since I've been here! He already knows a little bit and he's Brazilian so of course he's open to hearing about our church. So I'm excited to see what comes from this. A couple weeks ago we had divisions here in Beja with Evora and Elder Coombs and I went to a guy’s house that is a missionary for another church. We had taught him before, just about the restoration and he was pretty open to our ideas. But this time pretty much the second we sat down he started firing questions at us. It was pretty intense, but we handled it pretty well. Of course he'd heard bad things about us from members of his church so the questions he had were pretty interesting. It's interesting to see the progress of understanding another language. It's funny because I understand people well enough to know when they contradict something they had said earlier. Well hope all is well with you; it's freezing and raining here in Beja. Ficam bem meus amigos. -Elder Lindquist