4/20

How's everyone doing? Good? Well that's good.

As for this week, not a whole lot of incredibly amazing things happened with our investigators, really. Seems like some weeks are just filled with success and breakthroughs and others are filled with more and more new challenges to overcome. I feel like this one was a challenge week.

So for anyone not familiar with happenings in the mission field, there's a 12 week thing we do that basically just makes sure that we're prepared to become a self-sustaining missionary that could teach another new missionary by the end of the second transfer. This last week just happened to be the week where the new missionary takes the lead responsibility for pretty much every aspect of the missionary work. I began to appreciate the things that my companion does to keep things going and in order a whole lot more this week.

We had a Division this week (is it exchanges in English? I forget...) and I got to stay in my area with our District Leader, Elder Nymeyer! The guy's an incredibly cool American Elder, which means that I got to make some references that my companion actually understood for a day. It was cool, but that was a hard day. Not one single member was available to go with us, and almost every one of our lessons fell. We only had 4 lessons, only one being with a member! That seems like a good number for some missionaries, but for this awesome area it's pretty terrible. All in all, it was a good division though, and I learned to bring just a bit more fire into my lessons.

Other than that, I can only think of a few small noteable occurrences this week. Our new investigator Antonio Evora is probably in the middle of Alma right now, a week after learning about the church. His wife is a little hesitant, because she doesn't feel like her religion has had a bad influence on her life, so we gotta show that she had some good teachings, but not all of Christ's true doctrine. I contacted someone in his door, and he invited us in before I could explain our message. We were like okay, and taught him about the Restoration right then and there with his wife. It was cool.

That's really pretty much what I have for this week. The next week is probably going to be about twice this size, this is Elder Figueiredo's last week of the mission and I'll be getting a new companion (though 99% sure I'm staying in this area) next Monday. Gonna be a blast. Who knows, we got a couple of investigators who could be baptized any Saturday if they would just get a couple of things done. We'll see. Hope you all are Dimma-Dabtabulous!

I don't know what it means, just go with it.

Abraço,

Elder Penner