Insights from the Islands: the Musings of Elder Massey: I'm Shakin'

Recently, Praia has gone from like, normal temperature, to constant hot. Kinda like Jack White, Praia's 'got me sweatin' ', and like more than normal too. I've never enjoyed having a cold shower more in my life, and I've begun taking them every night when we get home cuz it's just so dang hot. It's a really nice feeling when you walk out of a lesson, and the wind blows, and your neck gets all cold because of the sweat lining it. It's a good image for y'all, I'm sure :)

This week rocked. Like, it was awesome. I think the main contributing factor to it was that there was very little office work to do, which meant we had very few days typing away and finishing up jobs we wanted done. We made a goal in our weekly planning to 'drop everything and leave' at 4pm so we could go teach, and it worked! Because of that, we had more proselyting time in a week than we've ever had, and with that, found so many small miracles that the Lord had in store for us. It was awesome.

A couple weeks back in our weekly planning, we decided to stop writing down names of people we knew just weren't progressing, but were people we could get an easy lesson out of. My theory with that was, for all the time we spent in those houses teaching, we were losing time out on the street finding other people who are willing and able to progress! At first, it wasn't easy, the last two weeks brought some of our tougher work days, but this week saw a lot of those decisions pan out. Out of all the new investigators we found in the past two weeks, this week helped us identify those who are progressing, which meant we were able to mark a lot more baptismal dates with these investigators. Among our new dates marked, we have three new people I'm really excited about:

Nelito: he's a guy we'd found a little while back, but have only really gotten around to teaching recently. He has a really thick Catholic background, so a lot of simple things like prayer and scripture study (by our terms at least) are rather foreign to him. We had an awesome lesson with him on Tuesday with our ward's Elders Quorum President, João Andrade, and it went really well. João was able to help him clear up some of his doubts he had, and has since been reading in the Book of Mormon and continually asking God about it. It's boss. He called us early Sunday morning to say he was gunna meet us at church. but cancelled last minute. He's really interested in our message though, and even gave us time this week to teach him before a driving course he's taking, and showed up late cuz he wanted to talk.

Belarmino: we've been teaching him for a while, but we knew he was pretty serious with his girlfriend and didn't really know all the details. He's already come to church a few times, and has gotten a lot out of it every time. We'd invited him to baptism in the past, before he ever came to church, and declined it due to concerns about being prepared and wanting time first. This week we had an awesome lesson with him about baptism, and invited him again, which he accepted, but started to get sorta skeptical when we were giving him an actual date. It became an awesome opportunity for both Elder Penner and I to bear our testimonies with him on how we knew he could be ready, and the impact baptism has had in our lives. The Spirit was 110% there. After hearing our testimonies and talking it out a bit, he accepted for a tentative date of the 21st of May. He's a boss.

Zefa: a new investigator we found a week or so back, who we actually contacted cuz her 5 year old son started contacting us :P funny how that works, eh? She's been open since we've started teaching her, and on our second visit, we found out she hadn't asked God to know if the Book of Mormon and our message was true, so we really focused on that, and when we came back yesterday, she was super excited to tell us what happened. She told us after she asked, she felt really calm, and stopped thinking so many negative thoughts. She said that she's been able to actually get sleep in her own house for the first time in what seems like forever, and felt that it was God telling her that he loved her. When we asked her what she thought all this meant, she told us, ' I think it means God wants me to follow this path, no, wait, I know he does. I know that he sent you guys to me'. It was an honestly amazing experience. We then got to testify to her and tell her we knew that God had sent us to her, and the Spirit was super strong. We're gunna work with her to be baptized on the 21st of May as well. She's been a straight up miracle from the Lord so far.

To cap off all the success we had this week, Elder Penner and I finally met the goal we had set together to teach 20 lessons in a week. We'd come so close a few times, but this week we did it :) with that being said, we're pretty sure this week is gunna be crazy. We gotta start with transfer stuff all over again, and that's sure to take up our work load a ton. It's been good though :) this has been one of the funnest weeks I've had in a long time :)