Hey Everyone!
This week has been the craziest of my mission so far, but it has been great. Portuguese is coming slowly, I am working hard but it is a little discouraging having been here for over a month and still being lost in the language and don't understand much haha but I hope to make a lot of progress this transfer.
We did a display table this week with a lot of church materials, Books of Mormon, vídeos, pamphlets, pass along cards, etc. We put it on a corner that a good bit of people walk by. We did it for about an hour. It went pretty well, we made a ton of contacts and found some great people to begin teaching! It definitely brought me out of my comfort zone haha
Friday was a wild day for a few reasons. First of all I did 500 push-ups throughout the day, 20 sets of 25 in my exercise time, meals and when Elder Salmon was busy with other things. It was crazy hard but felt great. I have been doing push-ups almost everyday for the past 4 weeks, It feels great! Friday Afternoon we we leaving the apartment and had just closed the door when we realized we had forgotten the keys. We went ahead and went out to our appointments and when we came back for lunch we tried to break in haha We tried to slide a bendy card through to unlock for about 30 minutes and it wasn't working, so our neighbor called the locksmith to come help us get in. It was going to be 58 Euros and we would have to use personal money to pay. The locksmith was busy somewhere else so we continued trying to break in. After 30 more minutes with our neighbor´s help wiggling the door while trying to shove the card in between to unlock it we finally unlocked it! We were so relieved! I did not want to pay that money haha
Friday evening we were on our way back to Sines from Santo Andre, about a 20K drive. We were almost halfway back and were driving 130k/h, about the speed limit, and were passing a car when the steering locked. Elder Salmon was switching lanes and kind of jerked over. I was like "what are you doing??" and he said "I can´t turn!" so I told him to stop immediately on the side of the road. The dashboard said, "CODE 68" We got out and looked at the car, nothing seemed to be wrong, we turned it off and on a few times and it was still locked, it felt like the power steering pump had gone out. We stood on the side of the road for about 30 minutes and called the Mission office. I was a little worried because the closest missionaries are an hour and a half away and the only active members that had a car to help us live over an hour away. We prayed and decided to try to make it back to Sines, Elder Salmon could turn the wheel with a lot of force, so we slowly and carefully began our journey back. We were going to stop at this car place, but it was closed so we just pulled into a gas station. We walked into ask for help and these 3 older guys were standing around a table. They had seen Elders before and began to ask us questions about what we do. After a little while they said they wanted to hear a message so we went back to the car and got 2 Book of Mormons and the Restoration Pamphlet. We basically taught the Restoration in the middle of this gas station to the 3 men and the cashier who was interested and listened in between helping customers. We gave a Book of Mormon to João and the cashier lady and marked an appointment for the next evening. We then remembered that we had come their to fix the car. We asked the lady at the cashier and she told us that João was a mechanic. He came and looked at the car and said that everything looked fine. We started it up and the steering worked perfectly. It was crazy! It worked fine on Saturday but we did have a few problems with it on Sunday and will have it checked out today. But nevertheless if we didn't have the CODE 68 problem we probably never would have ran into them. Our appointment with João fell through because of a miscommunication but we miraculously ran into him and set up an appointment for Sunday night. We taught him the rest of the Restoration, he told us that he doesn't know hardly anything about God or religion but that he wants to know what God wants him to do and he wants to hear more of our message. It was such a miracle!
Sunday during sacrament meeting we heard a loud noise upstairs, the chapel is in the basement, Our church building is at the bottom of a big apartment complex with stores and restaurants on the bottom levels. It was like someone was breaking through a glass window or something, . President Inácio told us Elders to go check it out. I was preparing for the worst when I looked out the window by the stairs and saw a guy getting cases of beer out of a storage room right next to the church, hahaha we were relieved along with the congregation haha it was funny.
We met with José Maria again this week. He realizes the more that he reads the Book of Mormon that it fits perfectly along with the Bible. The two books literally fit seamlessly together!
We knocked on a door and met a man named Bruno and asked if he had a few minuted to hear our message, he said that he had about 10 minutes. I was shocked haha he was the first person that has said that since I have been here. We taught him the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and left him a Book of Mormon! He said that he feels that our message is true and wants to learn more!
Last night we were walking by a park and I saw a guy sitting on a bench listening to music. I had a prompting to talk to him so I did, his name was Daniel, I taught him about the Book of Mormon and gave him one! He was sincerely interested. It was awesome!
Until next week,
Elder Anderson
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