Elder Atunes Encourages Missionaries to Teach with Scriptures

Minha Querida Familia, Today is the last day of my fifth transfer!!!!! This transfer was really good. We met our goal of 5 baptisms, 2 of them being men. This week was a good week, we had the opportunity to start to teach the cousin of Brandon, Marilia, and she got baptized yesterday. Really it was a miracle because every time we went to their house before she didn't want to know anything about anything because she already had her religion. I´m catholic is all we heard. But after she went to church and watched Brandon's baptism everything changed. She asked me on Sunday if we were going to visit them that week, and visit is what we did. She wanted to keep going to the catholic church and our church and didn't want to get baptized so soon, but by the second time we visited she had such a desire to be baptized. And Sunday Brandon received the priesthood, and he is already wanting to serve a mission!!! It was the first time that I saw someone receive the priesthood (do we say receive the priesthood in English? I don't even know anymore) And guess who baptized Marilia? Fabio, the baptism we had the first week of the transfer!!!! It was awesome to see the progress of all of our recent converts!!!! This week we had a mission conference with Elder Antunes of the seventy. He is SO AWESOME. SO EXCITED AND HAPPY. It was pretty funny because he pretty much told us all that we needed a lot of improvement, but he did it in such a fun, happy way. This week we had a lot of fire to do our best. A big point that he made is that we need to start using our scriptures, and its something that is so true. I wasn't using the scriptures a lot, and this week I used so many scriptures and they really helped invite the spirit to teach. When we teach without them we are teaching solo, but when we use the scriptures we let Heavenly father, Jesus Christ and the holy ghost teach because we use their words. Every lesson I taught this week I really felt the help I was receiving. Reading Franny´s emails makes me really grateful to be in Brazil. This week Brazil is going through a revolution or something of the sort, all the members are enjoying going to the protests because they say the government of Brazil is really really corrupted, but no worries, nothing too extreme in Vila Prudente. Hope everyone has a good week!! I bought a new camera this week!!! THANKS TO EVERYONE who helped!!!!! I´ll be sure to take lots of pictures and send them to all of you!!! I´m happy to see that all of you are good. Give away a Book of Mormon this week, I promise you won´t regret it!!!!!!!! PS- Is it true that missionaries can really use Facebook now?!?!?!?! Desi

The Power of Fasting

This week was great. We had the baptism of Brandon. Everything was so inspired and prompted by the Lord. He is the son of a member from Bolivia who moved back to Brazil a couple of weeks ago. The Saturday before he went to church with his mom all the people we had confirmed to go to church with us cancelled the last minute and when we told our LD he told us that we should pray for an elect to be at church the next day, and that we did and Heavenly Father truly sent a true eleito. The first time we went to visit him after we saw him at church he didn´t even want to listen to us. He seemed very closed off and said he was leaving so he couldn´t talk to us. Later his mom told us to back off a little bit because he told her that it seemed like we were exorcists and that we wanted to remove the evil spirits from him hahahahahaa. But this week I felt a strong prompting to go back and talk to him and when we got there it seemed like a completely different person, very open to everything. Brandon is a very intelligent young man, who knows a little bit about everything. The first time we truly taught him I felt the spirit so strongly, and decided to fast the very same day, and everything that happened afterwards with him was truly inspired from Heavenly Father. Sister Moura our sister leader felt like she needed to do splits with us, and teach him about the plan of salvation, the next day a member called  and told us that he felt like he needed to help the missionaries and he went and visited Brandon with us. The baptism of Brandon was so spiritual too. Bishop Marcelo said that he saw in the eyes of Brandon that he was going to be a great leader one day!!!! I´m so happy to have helped the Lord bring another sheep into his flock. We are also helping a single mom, Luciene, stop smoking to be baptized. She went to church this Sunday and loved it, and can´t wait to be baptized. It´s been really cool to work with her too. I know that through faith she can stop smoking soon!!!!!! Tomorrow is mission conference, and I`M SOOOOO STOKED because a general authority, Elder Antunes from the seventies is coming to speak. President Ferrin asked us all to start a fast right now so that we could be prepared to feel the spirit and learn things that will help us with our missions. I know it´s going to be an awesome experience Next week is also transfers, but I´m hoping that me and sister Lima get to both stay because we have been getting a long so great and she works hard!!!!!! I know that Heavenly Father blesses us when we are obedient and truly trying to serve others. Love you all, sorry for being so whinny last week. Hope everyone is doing good and trying to share the gospel!!!!!