21 July 2014

7-21-14

Dear Family,

It is incredible how fast time passes on a mission.

This week we finally moved apartments (I think it´s like my side calling to go whitewash all the areas that need new apartments because this is my 4th time doing it.) But our new house is super chique. I think it´s the nicest house I’ve set foot in since my first area that was super rich. It even has "hot" water in the kitchen (it’s more like lukewarm, but that’s still a big step up and I’ve only seen this in one other house as well) and it has 2 bathrooms hallelujah! But we didn´t have electricity all week because of some complications so we used candles all week, 2 of us gave in and took cold showers but in the winter that´s the world’s worst so we started walking to our old house at night to take showers and then come back. It made things interesting.

I decided a mission is good mom prep - you have to have snacks, paper, things to color, and the Liahona, every Sunday to keep the kids distracted during Sacrament. SIster Monteiro told us that during church are the 3 hours you work hardest and that is so true. I’m always burnt out by the end of it.

We had mission conference this week which was awesome! President is so inspired I could listen to him talk all day.

Really cool experience this week. We´ve been having a hard time finding Really good people these past couple of weeks and we were praying this week to find that elect family. We all felt like we needed to go to this one neighborhood in particular so the whole night we knocked doors there and didn´t find anyone really promising. So in planning that night we prayed again – “Heavenly Father where do you want us to work tomorrow, we know there are people out there that need us”. We felt even stronger that we needed to go back to that same area because we hadn´t found them yet. So we went back the next day and I was feeling so sure ‘there is gonna be some elect family here. Probably a Mom, Dad and 8 kids of baptismal age’ or something like that. We got to a house and a young mom let us in. When we got in there were pictures of Christ and temples on all the walls. Shortly after that we discovered she was a less-active. She had fallen away some time ago when her husband left her. This week she had been feeling really discouraged and she said she just didn´t know what to do but to pray and the night before she said “Heavenly Father I can´t do this anymore please send angles to my door to help me”. The next day is when we showed up. She cried a lot and was so determined she needed to come back. She even wrote goals on her wall, without our suggestion, to read the Book of Mormon, do family home evening and in bold at the bottom ‘Go To Church’. It was another testimony to me of how the spirit knows who needs us and when and we Always need to follow that guidance. She started inviting all of her friends to hear the missionaries and I think she´s our best ward missionary now. It was so cute to get to church and see her and her kids sitting there. She walked all the way there alone and got there early. It just puts a smile on your face :)

Pray for Marcella, Sydney, Jonathan and Bruna. They were all at church yesterday and are doing so great and we don´t want them to lose their faith and enthusiasm about learning about the restored gospel!

Also there´s a cool video on the church website called "Unto all the World" about missionary work in Brazil that they showed at our conference. You should all watch it and be those wonderful member-missionaries that make our work possible!

Love you all!
Sister Lewis

Photos - With Sister Moser, Silva and Bergloff at Mission Conference

- Hair and makeup in the hallway because we didn´t have electricity in our apartment all week :)