ward Sponsored FHE: a Brazilian tradition

Hello everyone! This week was pretty sweet. A bunch of people went to church yesterday, and we are hoping that even more come this next week. In our area, we have been having a lot of trouble with people commiting to coming to church. For this reason it has been really hard to baptize here. However, this week seemed to change things.

First off, we found three amazing families this week. Also, every family has more than six people in it. So that was cool. Let´s talk about how we found these families.

Our first family, I got to admit, it was pretty awesome how we met them. One of our recent convert families was having a little trouble staying active, and the birthday of the wife was coming up, so the we, the missionaries, and the ward marked a Ward Family Home Evening with them. This is actually quite common in Brazil, because many families of the church aren´t all members. So the ward sponsors Family Home Evenings when they need to. Anyway, this family showed up to the Family Home Evening, and we got their addresses, and taught everyone (Members, Non-members, and our Recent Converts) about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We then ate cake.

Later in the week we passed by the house of this family, and it turns out that we were actually really late for our appointment. I feel it´s pretty cool how different the Lord works with time and how we try and make use of it. This time, the Lord made much greater usage of our time. Let me explain why. We showed up at the house, just in time to catch the family leaving. They then randomly invited us to go with them to a surprise birthday party, which was the cause for their leaving the house. This may sound a little rediculous and like it would never happen, but people in Brazil are cool like that. And so we went to the surprise birthday party, wished happy birthday to the surprised birthday partyist, and taught the Restoration to this family and two others. We then ate more cake.

Later in the week we decided to stop by and buy pastéis with the other Elders. Pastel (singular form of the word that flipped your brain in the previous sentence) is a fried food that is super good that they have here. While waiting for the order to arrive, the other Elders started a staring contest, which began to weird some customers out. Apparently this game isn´t common in Brazil. However, we got some contacts off of their staring contest! We explained to a few people what they were doing, and then explained about the Church. Weirdest contact ever. However we managed to find our second family in this way. We then ate pastel.

And then, at the end of the week, we were contacting less actives from a list we got from the ward, and found our third family. They were pretty cool, and there´s like ten of them. However we didn´t get in much to say this week because they live on the limit of our area. We did teach them about the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and we invited them to be baptized, which they accepted. We then ate.... actually we didn´t eat anything that day. Oh well.

And that was my super awesome week everyone! Enjoy!

Elder Bishop