He heard us and answered because of our faith in Him

July 27, 2015

This week the Lord blessed us a lot and we baptized 5 people.

 And also I’ve bought terere to remember Jackson, it’s actually really good if you put lemonade in it instead of water, so that’s what I’ve been doing and I feel like a true Brazilian, even though no one in Fortaleza drinks terere and most of the people don’t even know what it is, haha. 

So this week was lots of work but it paid off. Here in my new area we have a huuuggee ward, and we are also right next to the airport haha. But to get to some of the lunches we have to walk 50ish minutes and then to get back to the neighborhood where we work it’s 50 minutes again. It’s really big. Well at least it’s really big for me because I’m used to small areas, so we’re pretty poor these days because sometimes we have to use the bus because there’s just not enough time to walk, haha. 

So this week we started our week planning our goals and what we wanted to accomplish in the week, then we presented our goals to God and told him what we would like Him to do for us (which was prepare 3 people to be baptized next week). We then promised Him that we would do our part (our goals... lessons taught and new investigators found).. so as the week went on we couldn’t seem to manage to enter in anyone’s house to teach. Everyone was rejecting us, which is pretty rare because we are in Fortaleza and here everyone likes to hear "the word of God". So we had a goal to find 15 new investigators and it was Friday night and we had only found 4. We had promised God that we would find 15 so we continued searching diligently. About 8 o’clock on Friday night we contacted a lady that was friendly and told us we could go to her house to teach her family. When we arrived there was a family of 6, 5 of which were at least 8 years old and thus we found 5 new investigators in the last minutes of our day on Friday. Saturday came around and the same thing happened again only now we needed to find 6 new investigators in order to fulfill our promise to God and we had to interview someone for the other elders in our zone at the church at 6 o’clock and we still hadn’t found any new investigators, so we got back to the area about 7:20. We started to contact some people and look for our 6 new investigators. We found a couple that accepted us well and we taught them in about 20 minutes to have time to find other new investigators in order that we could keep our promise that we made to God. We finished the lesson which went very well and went to a man’s house that we had contacted earlier that week. We still needed 4 new investigators. When we got there, he invited us in right away. We started to small talk with him a little and then asked if his family wanted to sit down with us as well. He said no (of course), as almost all people do haha, so then we asked if we could invite them. We went over and invited everyone that was sitting inside the house watching tv and what naught. They told us to enter and sit down on the sofa. All of a sudden there were 8 people in the room sitting down to hear what we had to say! In the last minutes of Saturday night God helped us find the new investigators!

So then we started to wait for these 3 people that we had asked God to help us find that would be baptized the next week. We had been inviting everyone to be baptized in the next week but almost all of the new investigators (I think all but 1) were unmarried couples, so they would only be able to be baptized after getting married which usually takes 3-4 weeks. So after meeting all of our goals, we were confident that the Lord would bless us according to our promise.

Sunday morning came around, we had planned on visiting a couple that had been going to church for a while but never had accepted to be baptized. They always loved the missionaries though. We went to teach them and with confidence in the promise we had made with the Lord told them that they would be prepared to be baptized this week. They didn’t accept with certainty but they said they would prepare themselves praying to know if they should be baptized this week and that when they know they will follow.

And the third person that God prepared for us to baptize... one of the ladies that was baptized this week called us Sunday afternoon because she was having a lot of stomach pain and said she wouldn’t be able to go to church or her baptism on that day. Elder Vasquez looked at me for a second and said to her, all right I’ll call you back in 2 minutes. And when he hung up the phone the Bishop’s counselor came over to us and said what is it? By the way this member of the bishopric (é o CARA). Elder Vasquez told him that she was sick and couldn’t get up off the bed. This member said, no way, so let’s go get her and give her a blessing because she IS GOING TO BE BAPTIZED TODAY. So he went over and borrowed the keys to someone’s car and went with us to this investigator’s house. When we got there we said that she would be better and that today was her baptism. The confidence that she felt in us that she would be better and baptized made her get up and we told her about blessings and she said that she had already received one in the past. We blessed her that she would be better and would be able to be baptized and she got up and got ready and came with us to church.... so here’s the part where the 3rd person that the Lord was preparing for us comes in. As we were waiting outside for the investigator to get ready a lady passed by and said, Lei’s baptism is today isn’t it? And the member that was with us said, yes, do you want to go? Go get ready and we’ll wait here, and she said you’ll wait?? And the member said, of course! So we waited and she came to church with us, and she loved it. She came out of nowhere and the Lord made it possible that through this ride that we gave to the investigator going to her house and through the invitation to go to church with us from the member, we had one more person at church that God will prepare to be baptized. He heard our prayers and did His part because we did ours. We set goals that were difficult for us and acted with faith. We asked the Lord specifically what we wanted and he heard us and answered because of our faith that was in Him. It was a miracle that she was at church. God heard us and answered. 

So that’s about all I got time to write this week, I also had to give a talk for 30 minutes and was given the topic about an hour and a half before church, haha but it went well. Hope you guys have a good week!  Love you guys!

-Elder Udy