So I can't believe that I'm almost 20 years old already! I have grown a lot this last year for sure. But I still have a lot to change and I've identified what I need to change too. It seems like forever ago that I turned 12 years old. I don't even remember a lot about being a deacon.
I'm not sure yet what I want to do for my birthday. I probably won't do anything different on Sunday [AJ's birthday is the 27th]. Since Monday is Preparation day, I was thinking about doing a pancake breakfast at this members house who lives real close to us and already helped out with a few home maintenance things. That will be cool.
So this last week we worked a lot. But we had very few results. I've been asking God in my prayers to make me a little more humble, and well, he's doing his part! We had the lowest number of lessons I've ever had in my mission. By this I've learned what we need to do to work better. I made a suggestion to Elder Mora about what we should do, and he was like, yeah that's what I told you from the beginning. And I asked, why haven't you done it then? And he said, because I'm following you since you're the senior companion. Later that night I felt like I should ask him "Do you feel like I listen to you?". And he immediately responded, no. We got to talking and resolved some of our differences. He has no fear in giving criticism and I have a tendency to defend myself when people criticize me. So there you have a bad combination. Like I told my District Leader, I got to thinking, wow this guy likes to pick at every mistake I make. And he got to thinking, wow this guy doesn't listen to a word I say. But we've talked it over several times, and I think we're finally understanding each other better as a companionship.
We had a Multi-Zone Conference this last week. Our Zone Leaders led a discussion about resolving problems in our companionships. We all read from 1 Nephi when it talks about Nephi breaking his bow. It's interesting to note that everything is fine and dandy, Laman and Lemuel are even humbled before the Lord, UNTIL the difficulty came and then everyone got angry. President Perrotti made a comment, he said that sometimes companions observe a mistake that the other companion makes and they think "Seu arco quebrou, problema seu!" [Your bow broke, your problem]. This is a problem that I had (and still have sometimes). As a junior companion I would observe mistakes that WE made and I'd think, well he's the senior, I don't have a part in this. But everything has to work if we're to be united. It's from this that we'll gain the power that we need to have results in our work.
So nothing's progressed with João. We could tell that he (and his family) didn't want us to pass by to teach anymore. It's really saddening. But like you guys said, we did our part, we presented the gospel and our teachings, and its up to them to decide. The work is going a bit slow. We only have a few people that have interest in what we're teaching them. We found this guy who's pretty much changing his life from black to white from what he's told us. He also lives super close to the church building! Unfortunately, it didn't work out for him to go to church this last week, but we'll pass by this week and teach some more.
Have an awesome week!
Elder Bradford
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| Planejamento [planner] before and after a missionary area transfer |
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| Our church building in Limeira |
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| Limeira!!!! |
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| The missionaries serving in Área Limeira |
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| So we had a rat in our house, and then we used poison, and then it died!!!!! |
