Elder Dallin Anderson's Mission Blog: Açores!!

Olá,

This week has been a whirlwind it started going to Lisbon on Tuesday and spending a few days at the mission office studying, playing piano and doing contacts because out flight didn't leave until Thursday. It was super cool because we had a devotional with Stephen W. Owen the young men's general president and Devin Durrant from the Sunday school board. It was awesome. The Durrants talked about teaching in the Saviors way with inspired questions and invited us to study how the Savior used questions to teach in the 4 gospels and 3 Nephi. Stephen Owen, who spoke at general conference, talked about the Doctrine of Christ and becoming converted to Him and how the mission is the time our our life to become converted to him and grow and change to become more like Him. I asked the Durrants what scripture they were each ponderizing this week then they asked mine i didn't have one but said that i would start so i choose Ether 12:4 to ponderize.

Thursday morning we went to the airport and when we got to our gate we looked over and saw The Durrants again, they were flying to Spain or France for more conferences it was cool to see and talk to them. Then I got on a plane heading directly for home got about halfway then stopped on an island to preach the gospel for a few months haha. The accent is different here its pretty funny sometimes. Casa is pronounced Caaaasa, they hold the second to last vowel really long haha.

4 Elders one Island. Terceira is incredible i have never seen anything like it and it is the first true island that i have ever been on. I have seen so little of the island but i have been totally amazed. There is one branch on the island in the city of Angra that is pretty strong, the biggest i have yet been in and has roughly 60 active members. And no one plays the piano so i will be able to play in sacrament meeting again! I played 4 hymns yesterday and it was super fun. I am glad for the opportunity i have had to get better at the piano.

The mission started another fast for 40 days we had ours on Thursday. That the night the Assistants and other Zone leaders were calling us and thanking us for our sacrifice, because they saw many miracles.

There are a good bit of tourists here i will start carrying a Book of Mormon because of all the English speaking Americans. We found a couple from South Carolina two times it was funny because they are super strong and prideful about being Catholic and tried to destroy our testimonies saying that the Catholic church is the same church that Jesus established and that Joseph Smith is a false prophet and this and this it was a little ridiculous. There are a lot of people like that that talk bad about the church without knowing much about it, they confirm the truth even more and the prophesy from Moroni when he said the name of Joseph Smith would be known for good and bad around the whole earth.

The people here are super cool i like them a lot a lot more chill and there are almost no Brazilians or Africans. Our miracle this week was Sunday night when our appointments had fallen through but we were super determined to teach a lesson before the week ended, so we decided to pass Dina one more time she said that she didn't have much time but we said that we would just explain the Book of Mormon for her in 10 minutes. She is awesome and was super anxious to read and pray about it. Her face just beamed and we explained and testified.

Até proximo,

Elder Anderson