Hello family,
Today I don't have a lot of time to write because the internet here is really bad.
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| Ward mission leader, Elder Henriques, Maikon, and AJ |
This rapaz
[young man] named Maikon was baptized yesterday. He was actually baptized four months ago, but he was never confirmed and after that he stopped going to church and started going to parties and stuff and using drugs, but he stopped now and he's doing fine. We were actually planning to baptize Christians' brother Tiago (Christian was baptized last week) on Sunday morning (the Bishop likes to baptize before church in order to do the confirmation on the same day). We filled the baptismal font and everything and were heating the water when Tiago's mom called us saying that he didn't want to get baptized at this time, so we were pretty disappointed. However, we knew that Maikon could still get baptized - two weeks ago he had come to church, but there wasn't time to fill the font and do his baptism. He was out of town last week and he had told us he would be baptized yesterday, so we left the font full of water and went with our Ward mission leader to his house. He was sitting at the bus stop with his brother (who is a member) and we picked them up and brought them to church. We brought Maikon to the baptismal font and said "look, it's already full...let's get baptized then?" The Ward mission leader already volunteered to do the baptism and Elder Henriques was there and had a baptismal suit about Maikon's size, so he was like okay fine. He changed clothing, we did the interview and got the President's permission (everything by the book) and baptized him. We did it during Sunday School and pulled in the Gospel Principles class with this huge family of 9 that we are teaching, and almost all of them watched the baptism so it was pretty cool.
I was thinking about three things that any person needs to do related to missionary work. I see that I need to develop these three things to be a better missionary: Charity, Testimony, and Courage. Let's suppose that I know Joe. If I have Charity, I will desire the best for Joe. If I have Testimony, I will desire that Joe can live the gospel and be a member, because I know this will be the best for him. If I have Courage/Faith, I will do things so that he can come to embrace the gospel and be a member, because I have Courage/Faith that through my actions, he can come to be a member and live the gospel, thereby entering in the pathway best for his eternal life.
So how do we gain these three things? Mormon teaches us that we need to pray and ask God for Charity with all the energy of our heart. Moroni teaches us that to gain a testimony we need to pray and ask God for responses to our questions. I'm not sure who taught this, but we also know that Faith is a gift from God that is acquired through prayer. Interesting huh? maybe you guys have some more insights on this...
Sorry for such a short email, but unfortunately my repentance in this is incomplete because my email next week will probably be much shorter. Thank you for the prayers and e-mails. I pray for you guys every day. I love you all very much!
Elder Bradford
