Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I am humbled by this opportunity to speak with you all today. I pray that these words will help each one of you in your busy lives.

This week was good and bad. Good as in we got lots of work done in the mission office, but bad because we didn´t get much done in our area. We have transfers next week so we are getting ready for the verdinhos (greenies) to get here and we are getting all the flights ready for the missionaries who are leaving. Usually President does the transfers the Sunday before transfers day, but he has been working almost this whole transfer with it and pretty much finished. We have been really growing as a mission, our last group was about 15 new missionaries, we are getting 15 this Tuesday, then 15 more the next transfer! Then leaving there are only 3 this transfer and 5 the next. So we are in a big need of trainers and let me tell you it takes a GOOD missionary to train so President has spent lots of time back in his office.

So one of my duties is the baptismal forms. Every time someone is baptized and confirmed, the missionaries send me the form with all their information then we send it all to church headquarters. I have to enter every paper into the computer, you get pretty good at it So as you could imagine, the best mission in the world has a lot of baptisms! So lots of baptisms means lots of forms and information. So I was having a little trouble organizing everything. I asked a few other missions how they were doing it and their methods weren´t really good either. So I came up with this amazing excel spreadsheet to help track everything. The church doesn’t have any official program or method, so I sent my spreadsheet to São Paulo (Brazil LDS Headquarters) and they loved it! So things are going well, I am just not looking forward to this Wednesday when Elder Cardoso (my trainer) leaves! Then if something happens I can’t blame it on him! HAHA but I am confident I will do a good job.

So the other day I was getting a haircut and you are going to laugh, but honestly it was the first time I have looked into a mirror and seen a man. I really have grown up so much here on the mish. I can see it and feel it mentally. I am thinking different. I love reading! I never liked it as a teenager haha. Jeffrey R. Holland claims to be the person most affected by his mission, but I would say I am pretty close. I just couldn´t imagine not going. This is such an amazing opportunity and experience, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

This past week I found a book by Grant Von Harrison called Drawing on the powers of Heaven. (computer crashed here, thank goodness for Word auto-save!!). So this book is so small but packed with amazing things. I have learned a lot about desire. In your words what does desire mean? To wish? So for example, I have the desire to learn how to play the piano well. Do I just wish to play it well or do something about it? Mr. Von Harrison describes a desire as a “motivating conviction.” So if I TRULY have a desire to learn how to play the piano well, I will practice DAILY and work hard at it, AND have the faith I can accomplish my goal. So then I asked myself, what is my desire on the mission? One word, BAPTISMS! I must admit, my desire of baptisms was the wrong definition at first, just a wish. But now I realize that if I truly desire to help people discover the truth, I need to work HARD. I cant just sit on my butt all day here in the office and expect to see people flocking to the baptismal font. So I challenge you to ask yourself, “what is my ultimate desire?” If it’s a righteous desire, God will help you to accomplish what you want. But what are you doing about it? We need to CONSTANTLY stay focused on what we want. If we relax and let our minds wander, things enter in that hinder our progress. We must focus on what we desire and work towards it. I tesify that the Lord will help us if we ask. He loves us and wants us to be happy. We our children of our Heavenly Father and he has made a perfect plan for us to return to live with him for eternity. That is why it is so important that we show our love and faith to him by keeping the commandments, praying, and listening to his servant the prophets.

Thank you all for your prayers and support, I hope you can ponder on these things and change your lives for the better! Have a wonderful week!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 at 1:27 pm and is filed under mission. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.