Week 73 - Camaragibe

Dear Family and Friends,

Happy late birthday Carter!!!! Looks like you had a cool b-day party! I loved the pictures! You are so grown up and cute!!!

About my week--it was really good! We have been getting a lot of references from people going on the church’s site and wanting to know more. The hard part is to find where they live though. We received a reference of a couple and we couldn’t find their road. We walked for forever asking everyone and everyone lead us in a different direction. But finally we found the road and we started looking for the house number. And here there is no order at all in the houses. One house is 4 and the next is 528 and the next is 83. But anyways we looked and looked for their house and we almost gave up. But then we found some houses behind other houses on the road and decided to see if one of them were it and we found it!! They live in a super humble house, but we felt the spirit so strong as we taught them. They were so happy that we actually came to see them. They thought that no one would actually come! But they wanted to know about where the church is and the hours and when they could come and visit! They couldn’t come yesterday because of work, but next Sunday they’ll be there! So that was cool and I’m so glad we didn’t give up.

A, the little boy, is doing good. His baptism date was to be this Saturday but it probably will have to be the 27 now. We still have a lot of things to teach because we can only get through a little bit each lesson. But he is getting better and paying more attention. His attention span grew from 1 minute to 3 minutes maybe haha. But also we have been teaching his less active sister and she has come to church 2 times now and yesterday she got an appointment with Bishop to prepare to go back to the temple! She read about ministering angels in Moroni and told us that she knows that angels led us to her house the day that we found her because now she is a lot happier and excited to come back to church.

This week I did an exchange with Sister Fortes!!!! It was a lot of fun to be with her again after all this time. She said how much I’ve changed and how good my Portuguese is now! She has changed a lot too. It is cool to see how much serving a mission changes people for the better.

I was reading Moroni 7 and I love the part at the end that talks about charity. Christ has so much love for each of us. A perfect love that I can’t even understand fully yet, but I can feel when I read the scriptures and teach others. Verse 48 invites everyone to be filled with that same love. The world would be such a happier place if more people developed this attribute of Christ. I have noticed what a difference it makes in my life when I try to look at others through God’s eyes and not my own. It is a huge perspective change!

I almost forgot! This week I had my final interview with President Bigelow. He is the best!! He helped me out with a lot of things and gave me a lot of talks to study and to start making life goals in 4 categories - education, health, social, and spiritual. We talked about a lot of things but I’ll talk more about that later because I’m running out of time!! 

I hope you have a great week! Love you all!

Love,

Sister Bedke