Bom dia everyone!
I hope everyone has had a good week! I definitely have! I am
still loving Brazil and the CTM. Things are so wonderful and happy here. Plus,
I´m getting a lot better at Portuguese so that´s really nice! The gift of
tongues is a very real thing!
So every Sunday and Tuesday we have devotionals and they´re
super nice. Ususally someone who used to be a mission president in Brazil will
speak to us. This week we had a member of the 70 come and speak to us-- Elder
Zwick. He told a super cool story about the gift of tongues. He was at one of
the temple dedications for a temple in Brazil and Elder Nielson from the quorum
of the 12 came to do the dedication. Not knowing any Portuguese, he would say a
little bit in English and then have a person translate into Portuguese for
everyone but then when it came time to do the dedicatory prayer, he said
"if I have enough faith and if everyone here has enough faith, I will be
able to do the dedicatory prayer in a language that everyone can
understand." Elder Zwick said he was sitting behind Elder Nielson and
could see that he had no papers in front of him and had nothing prepared. But
then he did the prayer in perfect Portuguese. How cool is that? I can testify
that things like that really can happen through the power of God. One of the
Elders in my district was having a really hard time with the language and
wasn´t understanding much of what one of my instructors (Irmão Santos) was
saying to him. But then my instructor started to testify of God´s love for him,
and I could see the Spirit touch this Elder and then he understood what my
instructor was saying for a good 2 minutes. It was such a touching experience
for all of us.
Portuguese can be a struggle, but I have a lot of faith that
God will help me learn it. The Brazilians are so sweet and love to help us
learn it. It was so funny though-- especially the first week and even sometimes
now, their absolute favorite word to use is "calma", pretty much just
telling us to calm down hahah. I guess we look like gaping fish whenever they
start speaking Portuguese haha.
P-days are super nice! We get to go to the temple in the
morning! Last week we went to the Campinas Temple and this morning we went to
the São Paulo Temple. Going to the temple is always such a nice experience and
brings me so much peace. Today they did the session in English and so that was
soooo nice!! It felt like I was at home doing a session in the Vernal Temple
:)
I still have yet to find someone else going to Recife!! Kind
of crazy, but it´s all good! Whenever I tell someone that Recife is my mission
they get really excited and happy haha. Most Brazilians seem to really love
Recife. And then after that they tell me it´s "muito quente" (very hot) hahaha.
It´s so humid here, but it´s totally worth it because everything is so green
and beautiful.
I love Brazil and I love being a missionary! I know that the
church is true. The fact that I can be doing something so hard, but still be so
happy testifies to me that this truly is the Lord´s work. I have been so
blessed in so many ways.
I love you all!
Have a good week!
Sister Anderson
