It was another difficult and rather strange week. It started
out with a wicked case of diarrhea which I probably got from drinking some
dirty water. It plagued me all day until a thought popped into my head,
"Why haven't I prayed for help yet?" Quickly I got down on my knees
and started a fervent prayer. Before I was even done praying I felt the pain
and urge "to go" leave my body. It was pretty incredible and in that
very same prayer I was already thanking our Heavenly Father for that blessing haha.
Truly was a crappy way to start the week.
I met all a lot of strange people during the week. One in
particular was this old guy up on the top of our area in Belem Velho. As I was
walking and I heard "Elder... Elder!" I looked back to this guy on
his roof calling out to us. He provided a tour of his house showing all these
scriptures and such he had put up on the walls throughout his house, he even
had this little sanctuary he made for Jesus. It was very weird and he was
obviously a little drunk. He asked us a bunch of random biblical questions that
we didn't know, and Elder Skouson kept on trying to get a lesson started. Turns
out the guy knows three languages German, Portuguese, and English. He is
actually a really smart guy and is rather well off. Later we found out his
whole purpose for calling us into his house was to give us and the church a
bunch of money haha. We obviously declined and set up a lesson this week.
Hopefully he will be sober when we show up because he could be a great addition
to our ward. Just weird things like this happened pretty much the whole week.
We did manage to find a new investigator. Her name is Carmen
and is a little on the older side. The problem is that she smokes like a
chimney but is really serious on stopping. It will be difficult but this lady
has a ton of faith. After one of our lessons I asked Elder Skouson "How
are we going to get her to stop smoking" and he replied, "just get
her to read the Book of Mormon." It is so true the Book of Mormon works
wonders. If someone really has a true testimony of this book they can do
anything.
Other things this week... I bought a gigantic chicken heart
pizza for Elder Skouson and I. It was my Christmas/birthday present to him. His
Birthday was the 23rd of December. And yes Mom the guy who baptized you is a
friend of the Skouson family. Pretty cool huh? It truly is a small world. I
asked Elder Skouson if any Skousons served in South Africa to find out if that
missionary who served with dad is a relative or not. But he doesn't know
because his family is huge. He said if the guy who served with dad had a name
spelt like Skouson then it definitely is a relative.
I received letters from G'Ma and Oupa this week. I got a
sweet picture of Seattle from G'ma and some reals (Brazilian $$$) from Oupa.
Oupa said that he had this money from way back when. It was cool because it was
a bunch of paper 1$ reals which are pretty rare to find in Brazil anymore since
they were converted into coins a while back. Oh some other news is that up in
the North of Brazil they are baptizing like crazy. In the Manaus mission they
baptized over 200 people in a week! To give you some perspective our mission
here in the south averages a little more than 600 baptisms in a year. That is
crazy!
Not much else this week. Just trying to stay out and about
working, hoping for success here soon. Lots of people are gone for the holidays
and we are getting denied by everyone :(. Hopefully we will get some
inspiration this week.
Much Love,
Elder Miller
p.s I only got about an hour to email including reading and
writing emails. mish rules
Tchau
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