Opa todo mundo!
Yeah, so it's starting to heat up real good here in Piracicaba [94° forecast for the 31st]. Sun beating down during the day, and believe it or not thunderstorms during the night. We have to keep the fans blowing on us the whole night to keep cool. One thing that I like about Brasil is you can go up to any house and ask for a cup of cold water. It's even easier to do after making a contact with someone, talking with them for a while in front of their house.
L is set for his baptism this Sunday. He is super excited. He's been making a lot of changes in his life to reach this point, both before the day he met us and after. He is quite determined to let go of his past life and continue forward. He's really an awesome guy. He sometimes struggles with retaining information we've taught him, usually when we ask him to read a scripture. I'll ask 'What did you understand from this scripture', and he just looks up and shakes his head. Sometimes he doesn't remember stuff from previous lessons. I've focused my study these past days on chapter 10 and 2 of Preach My Gospel, which talk about focusing on teaching people and not lessons. So I've been trying to make my teaching style more simple, and I think it might be working...or we just have the Spirit helping us out more :) The other day we taught L the Plan of Salvation, which we were worried about because, well, it's a lot of stuff in one lesson. But after we finished teaching, Elder McCann asked him, 'So, from what we've taught you, what is the purpose of life here on the Earth'. L turned to him and said 'To follow the path of Christ'. It was such a simple answer but I couldn't help but feel so happy that he had understood this principle.
One day about a week and a half ago we went over to L's house and his mom was sitting outside the front gate. We got closer and saw that she was crying. Elder McCann asked what's wrong but she just turned her head away from us. L came to the gate and we went and had our lesson a way from the house. He explained to us what happened, long story short his mom and dad had been fighting these last few days, and I guess that night they had been fighting and his dad made reference to something painful in the mom's past, and used it to attack her and all this stuff. We talked over it a little and encouraged him to talk with his parents about the problem. After the lesson we decided to do a prayer with the family, so we entered the house and his dad was there shaking a cup of beer in his hand yelling 'Minha vida é mentira! Todo mundo mente a mim!' [My life is a lie! Everybody lies to me!] and whatever, we calmed him down and finally did a prayer and left. I think it was the next day or the day after we met with L and he told us that he had sat down each of his parents and talked with them and now things have settled down. So that just goes to show how awesome he is.
Oh yeah, yesterday was the Primary Program in our ward. The Primary here is only about 12 kids, but the program was still pretty awesome. I couldn't help but think about the Primary back at home... ai que saudades. [Oh how I miss them]
Muito Obrigado por tudo! Infelizmente não tenho fotos esta vez. Eu arrumo algumas para a próxima semana! [Thanks for everything! Unfortunately no photos this time. I'll arrange some for next week!]
Elder Bradford
