Don't Let it Break Your Heart

I think Coldplay's fun song gives a good phrase to go with Elder Holland's talk this Conference. He basically told us that when tomorrow comes, "don't let it break your heart!" The real world is obviously different from the Conference Center, from the MTC, from that special testimony meeting. However, that does not mean that we have to get discouraged! The Lord loves us, and He's always on our side, He's always rooting for us all along the way.

And boy, was He rooting for Elder Massey and I along the way! What with Transfers, a Mission Leadership Council, and GenConf happening, we had very little time to go out and teach in our area. When we did though, we found the true blessings of the Lord. I think that we didn't have much more than a solid 12 hours in our area, but we somehow managed to get 13 lessons taught, and found a whole lot of sick new people.

We also managed to have some investigators show up for Conference. Mudinho and Neisha came with their daughter, and I think that Mudinho almost hit every session. Paulo (who's waiting for marriage papers to become a member) came to a session as well, and so did an investigator we had named Belarmino. Belarmino recently started coming to church, and so we're really excited about the progress that he's been making. He has expressed to us that he wants to wait a while to be sure about baptism, so we've been working on making him feel comfortable. He said that he really liked Conference, especially Priesthood Session.

Other cool news, we talked to Marlene (mother of a member, Kenny) and she finally chose a date for her baptism! It's so cool to see her at long last get over her fears and take that leap of faith! Last visit, we gave her every baptismal date in the month of May and told her to choose by next visit. We came back expecting to hear a date later in the month, but she confidently told us that she wanted the 7th, to which I said a quiet prayer of thanks. We're so happy for her, and we told her that we're going to power through the missionary lessons (she literally only has one hour a week to talk with us) to help her feel as comfortable as possible. She didn't make it to Conference, but we think that it's because of the super busy schedule that she upholds. It usually only works for her to go to church early Sunday morning. I mean, she could've gone to priesthood session, but I'm not sure how high that was on her priority list.

Highlights of Conference: President Monson giving two legendary messages with a combined time of about 6 minutes, President Uchtdorf's literal massacre of the male YSAs with the comment "if the perfect girl really is out there, do you really think that she'll go for you?" to which our chapel started roaring, and of course Elder Holland touching our hearts with the picture of the dinosaur chasing children. In all reality though, I found all the messages of Conference to be really inspiring. I'm also seeing the blessings that the temple is bringing to people, because Sister Zhuwaki (who's in my district) just happens to be from Zimbabwe! How neat is that? She gets to go home to see a temple built in her country!

Time flies when you're having fun and being a little stressed at the same time! Hope that you all have an enjoyable week reviewing the inspired messages we got these past two days!

Abraço,

Elder Penner