Monday, January 9, 2017

10 MONTHS DOWN

So today, makes 10 months in the mission for me! It´s crazy how the time flies! I´m hoping that these next 8 months can pass by a little more slowly, but we´ll see if that happens haha. 

This week was... good. Challenging, but good. I feel like this week was the week where all the devout members from other churches in Brazil decided to attack the Mormon missionaries haha. There was a lot of doing our best to defend the truths as peaceably and respectfully as possible as others preached to us. One day, we were walking to a members house, and as we passed a group of people we heard an older lady informing the other people sitting there that, "it´s the sisters from the church... they do sacrifices!" (like animal sacrifices and that kind of stuff) haha. We just continued on and got a good laugh out of it. And at the end of it all, I´m grateful for our religious freedom... and liberty of speech! 


Do you guys remember Tamires? She was going to be baptized... But a little before her baptism, she got back with her boyfriend Claudio. But it´s all good, she´s still doing well, loving the church, and now Claudio is starting to make changes in his life too! When we started teaching her, she had a really serious problem with drinking. But she shared a story with us that really touched me the other day-- It was back during Christmas when she just had a little time without drinking. On Christmas Eve night, she was really sad and with a strong desire to drink. And so she went outside and her neighbor gave her a cup of beer. She told us that she was about to drink, but then remembered that it wasn´t something that God wanted her to do, and started crying. She put down the drink, went inside, and said a prayer, and she said that after her prayer her desire to drink just went away. And all the rest of the night, even when she was outside with her husband and everyone was drinking, she didn´t have any desire to drink. When we act in faith, Heavenly Father truly answers our prayers and strengthens us! 


I just have to share one more thing-- the people here are so loving! A woman in the ward, named Neide, loves to give us lunch. But her mom is Catholic and has recently been fighting with her a lot about giving us lunch, and so she can´t anymore. But today she woke up at 6am to make us food and brought it to us! It made us so happy! I´ll send a picture that we took with her :) 


I love you all and hope that everyone has a wonderful week! 

Sister Anderson

Photo with Irma Neida!