This City's a Mess

Elder Massey and Elder Penner - MTC brothers reunited!

It's been another really solid week here in Bela Vista, Praia. As always, there's TONS of stuff going on. I apologize in advance for a rather random, all over the place, email.

We started off our week by doing a division with the Zone Leaders, which was super fun. As mission standards changed recently, divisions came to mean that both missionaries in one area would go to the area of the leaders, so Elder Amado and I both packed up for a day and went over the ZLs direction. I got to hang out with Elder Clegg, who I knew from Fogo, which was SUPER fun. They have these really cool stairs in their area that are all painted a different colour, so it looks like a rainbow. I made the joke that it looked like you were walking up into Mario Kart! Our division overall was powerful. We hit like 8:45pm without reaching our contacting goal for the day, so we sped contacted and did like 10 in 10 minutes, it was powerful. They've been without power in their house for a week so they've been living the struggle. 

I taught positively the weirdest lesson of my mission this week. Our ward mission leader gave us a reference of this guy in the street, named Nelson, so we went to teach him the next day, and he invited us to sit down with him outside a house, which was more or less normal, so we started with a prayer, and I started to teach. I knew it was gunna be a weird one when he stopped me and told me that our lesson didn't matter, because we did exactly what Jesus said not to do by praying in the streets; he then proceeded to go off for two solid minutes about how all churches are false, because the Holy Ghost chose him as a prophet and told him the truth, told us that it says no where in the Bible to pray with eyes closed, told us he was of the Tribe of Judah, and then said, 'yeah, Elders, I'll be honest, I invited you to talk with me cuz I respect you, I like what you do, and wanted to tell you, Jesus is coming in 2 and a half years, prep yourselves' and proceeded to grab my hand and said, 'let's close with prayer :)' and said he prays with his eyes looking to the sky because that's what Jesus said. I asked him where it said that in the Bible; he only responded saying 'love :)'. So, there you go, folks, we know when the Second Coming is, thanks to Nelson the Cape Verdean prophet :)

We had interviews this week with President Mathews, which was good as always. We had house inspections with them, so we cleaned our house super good, as I always seem to get ripped by President for having dirty houses while they are never, in fact, that dirty; they're usually really clean!! When President and Sister Mathews came, President tried to  tell Elder Amado that my house cleaning ability isn't very good, and said, 'man, you should've seen his house in Cova!' and I was like 'hey! you said that house was Celestial! ... It was the Maio house that wasn't good'. I got a nice smile out of that one :) hahaha. 

Sunday was also a really solid day for us, in that we had an investigator from the past week who we taught for the first time in a loooong time, named Cinthia, and it was really cool cuz she'd been waiting for us to come by, and as we got close to the church, we saw that President's car was in the parking lot, meaning he'd be at church with us; the kicker was that I was called the night before by our Branch's 1st counselor to give a talk, meaning I'd be giving a talk with President Mathews in the congregation. Needless to say, I was quite worried about impressing the congregation :P it went well though, thankfully. Pres told me I gave a good talk afterwards. The rest of the day went well in that we managed to teach lessons really consistently, just finding people at home ready to listen which was boss. 

Scaring moment of the week was having gun shots wake me up in the middle of the night one day. I was super confused about what was going on, and all I heard after were guys outside swearing in Portuguese. Nice experience, real nice. 

It's been a gooder. Lovin' life.

Love y'all!! 

Elder Massey