Monday, May 23, 2016

Passenger Seat

Good news! We can finally use our car again! Elder Massey finally received his replacement driver's license in the mail on Friday, which means that it's my turn to be the passenger seat guy for what'll probably be the rest of my time here as secretary. So I decided to give a shoutout to Death Cab for Cutie today. More people should really listen to them, it's sad how few missionaries have even heard of them here.

Anyways, we had a fantastic week here! I think one of the main highlights of the week was working with Belarmino over this past week. We talked to him on Tuesday about the baptismal covenant, and shared with him Mosiah 18:8-10, which basically says "if you want to help and serve others, and want to follow the true path of Christ, what's stopping you from being baptized?" We thought that he wanted to push off his baptismal date because he was scared that he wasn't ready. However, in that lesson we realized that he actually just wasn't understanding the actual importance of baptism itself. Elder Massey was inspired to ask him if he'd asked of God to know the truthfulness of our message yet, and Belarmino responded like "well yeah, but I don't think I've gotten the full answer yet." He's told us that he's felt good in doing what we've invited him to do, but he just hasn't felt that burning in the bosom that we all talk about all the time. So we've been working with him on that a lot. Later in the week we gave him the baptismal interview questions to show him that that was really the only thing that he really needed, because otherwise he's super prepared for baptism. We took him to the baptismal service on Saturday, and he was at church again this Sunday as well. We're really hoping and praying that he'll get his answer soon.

The main other guy that we've been working with is Nelito, who's been progressing well, except for the fact that it's been difficult to find him recently. When we found him a couple of days ago, we found out that he'd lost his phone, so it suddenly made sense why we hadn't been able to reach him. He's going well too, but he's also going to need a bit more time, because we haven't taught him everything he needs before baptism, so we decided to move his date to June. We think that he's super close to baptism too, so we're excited for that.

Also, a really funny thing happened this past week. First, we walked past this guy and I almost contacted him, but we thought that he could be Muslim (you can normally tell them apart here without being too nosy), and we have a rule that we can't contact them. So we walked past and forgot about him. Fast forward a few days, and he calls us over and says, "why don't you talk to me!? I want to hear your message too!" so we were like sorry and marked with him. Well, the first lesson came along, and the member that we were with said we should give him a baptismal date, so we marked him for June and invited him to go to church the next day. We passed by him Sunday morning, and he said that he had to wait for his boss to come back so he could leave his workplace. So we went to church kinda dejected, but he showed up like 20 minutes later! We think he's super cool, and the best part about it all is that his name's Baka, which is Creole for cow, lol.

Other super cool thing happened! A returning less-active member brought a friend to church, and the guy's awesome! His name's Adelei, and he went to church in Tarrafal and talked with the missionaries a bit there, too. When we got to talk to him, we were with Bishop and he asked us when he could get baptized. Bishop was like, "well, talk with these guys!" So we're super excited to start working towards baptism, and we don't think it'll be long!

A lot of other cool things happened, but I don't have time to talk about them, so sucks I guess. Anyways hope your week is as good as ours, and keep smiling!

Abraço,
Elder Penner

The pictures have nothing to do with his letter.  I asked him to take pictures of the marketplace there.  




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