21 Mar 2011 - Pedras Area (Dad)

This week was a week of exploration. We had lunch in the depths of our area, in the wilderness of Ceará. It's a green wilderness for now until the winter comes and the rain stops. It was just a bunch of underbrush and palm trees. I got to see some mountains though. The chapel is a 2-story chapel, so I got a good view of the mountains and took a picture. It's a refreshing site seeing mountains without snow, and full of palm trees I suppose. One day for lunch we got off waaaay too early so we had to walk for a long time through the wilderness. As the famous saying goes, every man must walk miles on a road running through the middle of the wilderness in Ceará, in the BLAZING sun, at least once in his life. By golly I did it and now I'm a man. To pass the time, and keep my hopes up, (your attitude is what keeps you alive when you are trapped on an island, mountain, long road) I was thinking and pondering. Then all of the sudden I was hit with poetic revelation. This is what I came up...."The sweatier missionary walked farther, worked harder...or he's just fat; either way his mansion in heaven needs be larger." Feel free to send that to Church Headquarters to print in the Missionary Planners. Man I'm a stud. There may be some of you that don't get it, but that's because it's divine poetry. Anyway, it wasn't really that bad. All the walking made the food and dirt water taste better anyways. The Lord has blessed us a lot this week. we have been having a hard time getting people to come to church, but this week, after more hard work, we were able to get 13 people at church. That's 4 times more than we had last week. One of the families was an accident. We walked up to a door, gate really, and realized it was the wrong house. It was too late though because we had already clapped (that's how you "knock" a gate door) and the people were already staring at the two mormons madly flipping through their planners for the right address. They caught us... so using my wit and charm I pretended like this was just the house we were looking for. They weren't fooled though, so we just talked to them and they invited us in. The message went well. The miraculous part was that they actually went to church and the people we were looking for wanted nothing. It may not seem like a miracle to ya'll, but we have been working hard 16 hours a day for 3 weeks just to get 3 people at church every week. So one more family is always good. It may also seem like we just knocked the wrong door and got lucky. I don't think so though, the Lord helps us in mysterious ways!!