Hey all tudo bem? This last week has been crazy and flown by so I'll try and remember everything it's been a pretty awesome week. Any news about the gender of the Nordlund baby? Last week we went to Sintra and hit up the quinta de reguleira which was sick! and we went with the missionaries/senior couple missionaries from caldes de reinha and on our way back the senior Elder said you guys should pass by this inactive member that lives in this little neighborhood over by this store, (he used to drive the sisters over there back in the day when Torres was part of their area) so a couple days later we passed by and it was amazing what happened.
She is the sweetest old lady that lives in the smallest oldest house I've ever seen and she was so excited to see us. Her cousin was there and we were able to teach them a lesson, the next day we had a big BBQ at the chapel so we invited them to come and anyone else who wanted to that they knew. The next day she, her sister, her sister’s husband, and her cousin were at the BBQ. Along with a Brazilian investigator we found over in São Pedro, (where our chapel is). The next day we had almost all of those people and more investigators in church! It was amazing. This last Sunday was the first time in ten years the sweet old lady (Maria dos santos) got to renew her covenants. She is so humble and was so excited to go back to church, the lack of transportation and distance of the chapel after the church left ten years ago made it impossible for her to go to church but this last Sunday she came and happily said the closing prayer in gospel principles class, that made me really happy.
So yeah things are going good our branch has two more baptisms this Saturday and maybe three if we can arrange the marriage/baptismal interview for Paulo, but it's getting down to the wire so I think we might have to push it back to June 6th when Maria de Graça and her daughter are marked.
Ha the other day we had a lesson with our Russian investigator ilhá and I brought my pictures to show him and he saw the picture of Mom and Dad and me sitting in front of the temple and he said that dad looks like Bruce Willis with his shaved head. Ha he's a cool kid he got an answer to his prayer about the Book of Mormon so we're trying to help him quit some bad habits and I have faith that he'll eventually be a missionary! My favorite thing to do with him is take cigarettes out of his mouth and tear them up.
Today will be fun the Elders from Mofra are coming up to play tennis with us and then Elder Peterson has to go to cacem for some meetings and the other Elders and I will go to the chapel to teach gospel principles and I'll be teaching an English class, we're just starting it this week so we'll see how it goes. I'm going to teach them how to pray in English! Well have a good week everyone I'll let you know how the baptisms and everything go next week.
Thanks for the weekly emails I always enjoy hearing from you guys. This week was pretty good things are running pretty smoothly here, lots of stuff happened that I'm not sure I can remember but I'll try. We have been working really hard and with the lack of members here it is really difficult to get references, thus leading to a million hours of contacts and knocking but we're coming along and are still able to find a steady flow of lessons. Because our area is so huge and includes a bunch of towns, (big and small) we try to spread things out pretty evenly. Maria’s neighbor that we taught with her came to church on Sunday, his name is José António and he's an awesome guy. Very poor and humble like Maria. On Monday he called us and was like you guys are picking me up right and we were like for what? He said for church this coming Sunday! We were like well yeah of course. It was just funny to get a call that early in the week from someone who has such a desire to go to church. We also taught Maria’s sister, Maria José and her husband João. They can't read so we brought the Book of Mormon CD's for them to listen to. They fed us a BOATLOAD of Feijoada, (which is basically like a bunch of beans and big chunks of pig fat). This was the first time on my mission I had to pray while I was eating that the food would not project out of my mouth and onto their table. There was this one piece that was probably the size of a small chicken and took me like ten minutes to chew, but I got it down and I'm grateful for the people here and their willingness to feed us.Yesterday we had our last zone conference with President and Sister Terry and it was excellent. I'm going to miss them a lot they help the mission so much and are such great people. President Terry truly is a man of inspiration.I'm excited for this week it will be good, tonight we're going to teach English class and I'm pretty excited because the other day we went to São Pedro da cadeira and found a bunch more Brazilian investigators that are friends with the ones we already have out there.. There's a house just full of them so we watch the Restoration DVD, (I swear by the end of my mission I'll have that movie memorized..) and they thought it was interesting, a lot of investigators I didn't think had that much interest or would progress very much and doing just the opposite so I just need to use my "eyes of faith" and they say here and the Lord will help them progress. Well I better go have a great week!-Elder Lindquist
