The Brazilian Adventure: Week 40 March 3-- March 9

My Dearest beloved Family and Friends:

    Great week. This week I spent three days outside of my are doing splits. It is a normal thing now. It is a lot of planning and work. It is also a lot of fun. The Lord is helping with a couple areas in my life that I´m not so great at. Like planning, goals, and other things. It is great. My district is doing great. We have one group who are having some hard times in their area, but they are working hard. And so the Lord is going to bless them probably not the way they want it, but the way that he needs it. We are trying to work a lot with members. All the members in our areas work a lot and don´t have a lot of time. They also don´t have a lot of trust in missionaries because a couple that have passed by weren´t the best missionaries in the world. But that is changing, and the members having more trust in us. And also a lot of members believe that just missionaries need to do missionary work. Oh no no no (I think the whole world is probably like that.) We are trying to get them all excited and to help them realize the revalation of President Thomas S. Monson that now is the time that Missionaries and Members work together. That is revelation from our heavenly father. There are to many families getting destroyed by the wroldly things by Satan and way to fast. And so the Lord said that he can´t handle it, we need the members. They know these families. They now the area. We missionaries are just 1 person, We need more hands in this labor. The success is through the members. And so we are trying to help them realize that. And it is getting there. Yesturday we had a stake conference presenting our mission program to the members. It was great. We did some pratices. Us missionaries sang a hymn together that we have been praticing. And President Pihno gave a great talk. It is going great. He talked about how the church took away the mission keys form the Mission presidents and they passed them to the Stake presidents and Bishops. He also gave an interesting statistics. We have about 85,000 missionaries in the world. We missionaries baptize about 200,000 to 300,000 people a year right. We have about 15 million members. We have about 9 million who are active. If 5 million of those active members would pray to our heavenly father and bring just one person to church this year to accept the gospel and be baptised, and that is pretty easy. There would be 5 million new members. According to the math, with just the missionary efforts, it would take us missionaries 27 years to accomplish that. You see how clever the plan of the Lord is. This is what the meant in General Conference when they said that now is the time to accelerate the work. But just like the church and the Lord are stepping it up, Satan and his army will be stepping it up also. So we need to work together and fight back. We need to save these souls. We need to wake up and get going. It is a lot of fun and brings a lot of joy being a part of this great work. 

     So last P-day during the work. We were walking over to visit someone when all of a sudden we recieved a text from a phone number that we didn´t know. It said that it was Fernanda and that she wanted to talk to us about baptism. We got all excited. And then we thought that maybe the other Elders playing a joke using a members phone. So then we called to see if it was real or fake. And when we called, it was Fernanda! and she said that she talked to her parents and that she wants to be baptized this sunday. We were so happy! So this week we accomapnied her real good. And on the Sunday morning she was baptized. We had some dificulty preparing the baptism. We don´t have the keys to the baptism fount yet and so we were running all over the place trying to get these keys. But after a while, we got them and the baptism was a success. It was so awesome. She was so happy. Just her mom and brother came. Her dad was working. But she was happy. And then she recieved the Holy Ghoust, with a little reminder for the bishop. 

   When I was on splits with Elder J. Braker on time, someone threw an egg at us. It hit him. It was so funny. It came out of nowhere. 

   Hope you are doing great. Love you all. 

Be happy.

Love, The Elder Jones