Bom Dia! TRANSFERS! Here is the news, I am staying in this area and Sister O is outta here. I will receive a new companion tomorrow but I am not sure yet who it will be, we find out when we arrive at the chapel tomorrow. It should be interesting teaching someone a new area but I am excited. It wasn´t really a suprise though because Sister O has been in this area for almost 8 months already.
Breaking free of the World Cup has been the best thing that could happen to this area haha. It is like we have been hibernating, and people are starting to wake up and warm up a little bit more. We have been really searching for families to teach and talking to literally everyone that passes us. This upcoming week is going to be great because it is filled with appointments with potential investigators.
We have been doing a lot of work with membros menos ativos and are starting to see a lot of progress with them. It is so important to work to help people remember the significance of the covenant that they have made with Heavenly Father. We have had a couple of really cool experiences in these last couple of weeks.
First I´ll tell the story of Cicera, we found her just before the World Cup started. We had been walking through the favelas trying to find a house that seemed like it didn´t exsist. We passed a little shop that had been set up in the entrance of the house that sells like candy and basic house things like eggs. Cicera was standing there kind of looking at us funny as we passed by so we stopped to talk to her. We started to talk about the church and our purpose and she interrupted us and told us that she had been baptized but had been afastado for a long time. She started crying as she told us a little about her life and the challenges she has passed through with her family. She invited us in and we have been teaching her ever since and she has come to church almost every sunday since that day. For us it had really been such a miracle that day because almost all of our other appointments had fallen through. Had they gone through we would have never had time to search for that house and we wouldn´t have passed by that day and found her. This week she told us the story from her side of view and we were able to see how big of a miracle the timing had been.
She told us that she had been attended the Universal church for almost 20 years but about 6 months ago she stopped going for some reason or another and had been feeling the lack of the Lord in her life pretty strongly. The week before we found her, her nephew had gotten really sick and she had been sick worrying about him. She said almost every day missionaries from Universal passed by her house and she decided to wait for them and ask them to say a prayer with her for her nephew. (She was also praying for guidance as to which church she should attend. ) So everyday that week she waited at the door of her loja waiting for the other missionaries to pass by. She started to feel desperate one day and said a prayer that the missionaries would pass by because her nephew was getting worse, that same day who walked by... us. I know that Heavenly Father leads us every single day to His children who are ready to receive us. Any other time the missionaries from our church passed by she just let them go by without saying anything but we started to talk to her and she said it was an answer from Heavenly Father she could not ignore. Everytime we have days where everything falls through, I know it only happens because he is preparing someone to put in our path. As long as we work, always searching for guidance of the spirit through prayer, we will be lead to exactly where we need to be.
Another cool menos ativo story is about a man, I don´t even remember his name, that we met my first week here. We were walking in the street and stopped him to share the gospel. He told us that he had been afastado for 10 years but that he used to be really strong in the church. He told us he didn´t have anything from the church because his house had burnt down and his family had lost everything. We gave him a Book of Mormon, invited him to read and ended up having a lesson with him there in the street. He wouldn´t give us address or information because no one, especially not his wife, would except people from the church. He told us he would think about coming back to church and that was that. Yesterday we ran into him again found out that he had actually began reading the Book of Mormon we when we gave it to him. Thats not even the best part! The sisters in his ward (who live in the same house as us) had found their address some how, and had begun visiting his family this week! He was so excited to tell us how the hearts of his family had been softening and they were preparing to go to church again together. Miracles are real! Sometimes we think the small things we do day to day, the random lessons we give to half-interested people in the street, won´t amount to anything. But really nothing happens for nothing. The plan of Pai Celestial is so much bigger and grander than we can imagine. His plan is perfect. All we have to do is follow the spirit and open our mouths and pronto.. we will see miracles everyday. Not only will we see them, but we can know and trust that miracles happen even when we don´t see them.
AHHH times up. Sorry, Love you all! Have a great week!
Sister Seagraves
