Update

Dear Family,

 

Thank you all for your emails, letters, and support. This week was great. It is awesome to be with Elder Bracken who is straight out of the CTM with a lot of energy and desire to work. He is picking up on the language quickly and we are seeing miracles every day! This week was great because we are working extremely hard every day and it feels really good at the end of every day to go to sleep knowing you spent all of your heart, might, and mind in the service of the Lord that day. We don´t have a whole lot to report from this week but here is one cool experience that happened this week that I wrote in my email to President Ferrin.

 

We had a pretty cool experience this week. We were walking down the street and passed two women talking on the side of the road. We passed by them but then felt that we should go back and talk to them. We turned around and made a contact with them. We marked an appointment with one of them and when we went back to teach her the lesson went extremely well! We left her the commitment to pray and ask God if the things we said were true. We went back the next day and asked her how the prayer went. She said that she prayed and then opened up the Bible to a passage that talked about God sending a man into the world to preach the gospel. God told this man not to bring any food because God would provide for him. God sent this man to preach the Gospel and to give a book to people. People the people were to eat this book and the book would be sweet like honey. When she said that we pulled out the Book of Mormon and explained it to her. It was a really cool experience for us!

That´s all we´ve got for this week!

 

Eu amo vocês!!

-Elder Anderson

Elder Joshua Bracken!!

Dear Family,

Thanks so much for your letters, emails, and support. This week was awesome! This week I received my ´´greenie´´ Elder Bracken. He is from El Paso, Texas!! What are the chances that I would receive a Texan? Anyways he is 19 and from El Paso. Before the mission he went to college at BYU Idaho. He cae straight to the CTM here in São Paulo and stayed there for only 6 weeks before arriving in the field on Tuesday. He is really excited to work and I am really excited to train. This week we worked super hard. This week past week before Elder Bracken got here Elder Ciríaco and I had the baptism of Nivea and Tony. Nivea is a woman who we found who´s mom has been a member of the Church for years but she never wanted to join. However we found her and began teaching her and she accepted everything easily. She quit drinking coffee and on Sunday was baptized. Also Tony was baptized on Monday. He was recently married to his wife Juliana who is a member of the church. Anyways the sister missionaries found him in another area and referred him to us. He was an excellent investigator and before he was even baptized he was asking when he could go into the temple to be sealed to his wife!! They were both confirmed yesterday and Tony will receive the Priesthood this week. This week was awesome! I just rememberred that I forgot to write about a funny story that happened a few weeks ago. A few weeks ago I was on a division with another missionary named Elder Soares de Souza in my area. Anyways we were walking on the street and we passed a small church. We looked into the church and saw the pastor of the church kneeling on the floor banging on a chair!! I have no clue what the purpose of that was but he looked up all of a sudden and saw us and started yelling and pointing at us!! At this point the whole congregation turned around and started looking at us. We quickened our pace but the pastor jumped up off the floor and started running towards the door pointing at us. We started walking even faster. The paster threw the door open and ran outside yelling at us ´´Get back here!!´´. We took off and never looked back!! It was kind of strange when it happened but now it´s just a super funny story that I think of often.

Love you all!

-Elder Caleb Anderson

Dia das Mães is arriving!!!

Dear Family,

Thank you all for your emails and support. This week is really rushed too so this email will be short. But I am super excited for Mother´s day to do skype!! This week was a good week. We´ve got some really great investigators who are progressing well. This week should be really good. We are still working with Junior and he is progressing well. Hopefully this week he will be completely prepared for baptism. I am really loving the ward here. The people here are really great and they help a lot. This morning I went to go get my haircut for the first time here in Brazil. It was pretty cool because you can get a really great haircut for cheap. However I need to brush up on my portuguese haircutting vocabulary because I didn´t understand a word the guy said!! Anyways I just kept saying ´´yes, yes, yes´´, however that wasn´t the best move because now I look like a Porcupine!!!! It is kind of funny actually but mostly just embarrassing. Especially because right now we are going to a zone p-day activity and we don´t have time to pass by the house. Anyways I think I´ll try and get a picture and send it to you guys. Its a pretty funny story that I think I will remember for a long time. That´s about all I have time for this week!

 

I love you all and am looking forward to Sunday!

-Elder Caleb Anderson