We went up and took pictures from the rooftop tower

Jan 12, 2015

Elder Udy in Fortaleza, Brazil

So this week was pretty good. Our house is slowly but surely getting better as we do more and more cleaning each week. No house could be as bad as the first one that I had in Conjunto Ceará haha. So this week a recent convert visited us in our apartment and brought me Christmas presents. One of the things he brought was a gigantic watermelon that he brought all the way from Rio Grande do Norte just for us! (the next state over) So we took some pictures of the watermelon, I’ll send it to you. As well this week, I went on exchanges with the zone leaders, and in their house there’s a hatch in the roof that you can get onto the roof of their building, and once you get onto the roof you can go up this tower that's on the roof.  And we went up and took pictures. From the top you can see everything. Downtown, the beach, all my areas, it was pretty wild. We took pictures. Now I’m just waiting for them to send the pictures, and then I’ll send them to you guys. 

So sometimes I think about how Cole will be different when I get home... but it seems like he’s still the same watching Bill O' Reilly and loosing things. He must be Jackson’s brother. So that’s exciting that Slippery Rock is winning some games! Maybe they’ll even make it to playoffs! Hopefully they’re being well coached and enjoying their season. 

So this week we had lots of ups and downs. When we were teaching one of our investigators, he tried to cut us and give us back his Book of Mormon and his teachings of the prophet Ezra Taft Benson that he got in church. He told us how he had talked to his Priest and learned about a bunch of apostasy and had decided to remain Catholic... so then we reminded him about how he had read the Book of Mormon (Alma 32 and 3 Nephi 11) and asked him if he believed it was true, and he thought for a few moments and said “yes.” So then we read with him 3 Nephi 11:22-26 https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/3-ne/11?lang=eng and verse 38 and taught him that Jesus Christ taught in 3 Nephi 22-26 how we should be baptized, and we read in verse 38 that if we aren’t baptized the way that Jesus taught, it is impossible to enter into the kingdom of God.... so his baptism was delayed a little bit but it'll happen in a couple of weeks. This week we’re trying to make plans and do things different to bring more people to church... if I learned one good thing with Coach Bushre it was that the definition of craziness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So next week I’ll have some stories to tell. So I hope you guys are all well. Dad should be getting excited to be released.. or sad at the same time. Hopefully he likes his next calling. Maybe he’ll get called to be a mission president and Cole will have to leave all his friends to go live in another country, haha. 

Have a good week! Don't forget to be missionaries!  Love you guys. 

Elder Udy