Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Proselyting last Friday was a great experience. I wasn't too scared. I had the basics of what I needed to say memorized, but I couldn't understand any of what was said to me. My companion Elder Hahne and I went together, of course, and it was just our district and our teacher in that area. We were in a sort of town square in downtown Sao Paulo, right in front of a great big Catholic cathedral. That didn't matter much, as we were able to hand out all of our pass along cards and all three of our Books of Mormon. What was also really cool was that we saw two real Catholic monks outside of the cathedral.

We are starting to teach the first lesson in portuguese and the second lesson in english. They expect us to speak only portuguese now, especially in class, but that doesn't work out because none of us can speak it well enough to be able to get anything done, so hardly anything has changed. The proselyting experience makes me excited to get into the field.

This past Sunday I spoke in church. Sacrament meeting talks are a little different here. Everybody prepares a talk on a decided topic and four people that are supposed to talk are called out of the congregation. I knew the minute sacrament meeting was over the previous week that I would speak the next week--personal revelation. I knew without a doubt that I was going to speak and sure enough I did speak. Also, that Sunday my companion and I blessed the sacrament in portuguese and when I walked into sacrament meeting the district leader of one of the new groups came up and asked me at the last minute if I could accompany them in their musical number. It was "The Spirit of God" so I said yes. I was very happy because everyone was impressed with me that day that I could do so much in one meeting and did a great job on my talk. It made me feel good.

I've included two pictures. The first is of our entire district. Back row: Elders Heimuli, Moura, Sisters Jones, Pierce, Kitchen. Front row: Elders Hahne, Larsen, Benson, Doolhoff, Page, Brewer. The second is of Elder Markowski from Bountiful and myself."