Chapter 15 - When a Fish Comprehends Water

Elder Lofthouse visited an aviation museum for P-day today

Hello everyone. This week, I just have a bunch of random things to say. First, some more things I´ve learned about Portugal.

1- All cigarette boxes have lables on them that say things like, "Smokers die young" "Smoking causes infertility" "Smoking kills- Stop already!" and things like that. It´s basically a giant guilt-trip scheme to try and reduce smoking (and the people of Portugal need to reduce their smoking).

2- The LDS churches don´t have steeples on the building. Instead, it´s a free standing tower near the building.

3- I don´t know if this is all over Portugal, but a lot of the street lights turn off when we walk past them. Again, I have no idea why this is, if it only happens to missionaries, or if it´s only in Alverca, but it happens all the time.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that here in Alverca, the first people to get to church on Sunday are the deacons and teachers. Most of them arrive before their parents (and everyone else). Honestly, the young men here in Alverca have been so cool. The young women are normal, spending lots of time on their phones, and other such stuff, but the young men are just crazy. They´re a happy just about all the time, they´re all great friends with each other, and it´s just great, and they always come to church and mutual, even though most of them have to walk to both.

Anyway, some cool things happened this week. First, I had the opportunity to give a blessing. In Portuguese. It was awesome, and I was super nervous, but it went well.

I have to pause right here, because just now, Elder Fonseca walked up and actually bit me and said, "Sou vampiro" or "I am a vampire." People are crazy here.

As I was saying, interesting things happened this week. Elder Carreira is Distric Leader, so he has to do exchanges with the elders in our district, which means I get to, too. On Friday I went to Póvoa with Elder Tillman, and it was crazy. But Elder Tillman is super cool, and he taught me a lot in the short time I was with him. Oh, and before all this, on Thursday, we had Zone Conference. It was awesome. I love being able to talk to the missionaries that have been out for a long time and hearing about how they struggled in their first few transfers, because it gives me hope for my future as a missionary.

We have one investigator on date for baptism. He´s the father of a member here, and he´ll be getting baptized this weekend.

This week I learned about gratitude, faith, and gifts of the Spirit. Gratitude and faith are both needed to survive trials and hard times, and are needed to fully enjoy good times. And what´s more, gratitude and faith are both gifts of the Spirit. I had been trying to be more grateful this week, and then I read about gifts of the Spirit, and so I decided to pray for the gift of gratitude, and holy cow, it made all the difference! In reality, Gifts of the Spirit are how we can overcome basically any challenge we are faced with. To get these gifts, we have to pray, believe that we´ll recive them, and work to develope them. Also, we need to remember that all good things are from God, including any and all positive attributes that we or anyone else have. So my challenge for you all this week, is to think of one thing you can improve on, and then pray, and ask God that He will bless you with the spiritual gift that will help you acheive what you want to achieve. I promise that God will help you, and that He has gifts, talents, and skills He wants to give to you, but He can´t until you seek them.

That´s all I have for this week, really. I love you all, and I hope you all have a great week!

Elder Lofthouse

Chapter 14 - Realizations and Revelations

Good morning, my friends! I hope you all had a great week.

I had a few realizations this week about why I should have been more greatful for things before my mission. One evening as we were heading home, I was thinking about how as a missionary I felt like a wandering vagabond. I live out of this little apartment, I plan my whole day on my own, and basically no one around really knows whats going on for me. And then I realized that that is probably more like real life than my past! I always had home as kind of a home base to live out of. But it wasn´t always like that. My parents had to put that all together for me before I got to enjoy it. Basically, I was blessed with a very solid life, because of my great parents. I always had a real home to go back to (not just a little apartment that lacks emotional connection) and that was my place in the world. So I guess I´m saying, Thank you, Mom and Dad, for making such a great home for me.

My second realization had to do with something that happened this month. It´s one of those things that I coulnd´t tell while it was happening, or my mom would have freaked out, but now that it´s past I can tell the story. Basically, for some reason, I wasn´t switched from the Spokane, Washington system to the Portugal, Lisboa one when I came here, and because of this, I didn´t get any money in October. I wasn´t really worried, because the members are awesome and my companion is, too, but for the last few weeks I´ve really been watching my funds, and it has been a great budgeting experience. But anyway, I got through to the 15th, and was kind of surprised that I had made it through half the month on last months money, and then things started getting really tight, but then just before I ran out, the finacial secretaries were able to get some money on my card. But what´s funny is, I went through most of October on September´s money, and then I got my money for October this week, and I´ll get my money for November pretty soon, too. So basically I´m going to have a bunch of money once November starts. I was thinking about this, and I think that in our lives, blessings can kind of be like this, too. At some points in life, we feel like we haven´t recieved our "allotment" and we´re just barely scraping by on what we have. These times can be rough, but I can say now from experience that if we just hold on, blessings are just right around the corner, and pretty soon we´re going to be swimming in more blessings than we know what to do with.

So there are some thoughts for this week. In terms of actual stuff that happened, we started teaching a new investigator who is awesome. There are a bunch of members here who moved from Brazil, and there are a bunch more coming. A few single men are here, working until they can bring their families, and the members are being amazing people and hosting a lot of these people. Our new investigator is one such man, who is currently living with the ward mission leader. So basically, he walked right into our trap, or rather, God put him right in our trap. He´s super open and humble, and I can´t wait to see him progress.

I´m going to add more pictures to my mission pics folder. If anyone doesn´t have access, email me.

I love you all! Keep being awesome!

Elder Lofthouse

Chapter 13 - And it Keeps Going On (la la la) and We Really Love the Town

I don´t remember if I told you all yet, but I´m in an area called Alverca. It´s really cool, but not temperature cool, just Portuguese style awesome cool. Basically I like it.

This week I had an interview with President Tavares, I went on splits with Elder Rodrigues, one of our zone leaders, and we had Stake Conference. They were all super good. Stake Conference was especially good, because it was just like back home. Mostly. It was really cool, because in the morning, we got up and went to a bus stop, and then two members came and found us and took us to a different bus stop, and the whole ward was there, more or less. I then found out that the Alverca Ward had paid to have one bus for them all to go to Stake Confrence in together. It was super cool, and I could just feel the love the members had for each other during the whole conference, even though I didn´t understand a whole lot of what was said.

Not much else interesting happened this week. We did knock on one door, and the lady behind it yelled (in English) "Go away!" Elder Carreira and I walked about five steps away and just busted out laughing. I really don´t know why it was so funny, but it was. We left a card on her door that said, "God loves you!"

For my scriptural thought of the week, I want to go back to the Hebrew number symbolism. Back in Washington, we kind of made it a joke to count lots of different things (like birds in a flock, or tiles on a wall) and interpret the numbers. It was kind of funny, but sometimes the numbers of things really do work out to be quite cool. So, to recall, 2 is opposition, and 4 is mortality. So four twos basically refers to the opposition of mortality. So we could guess that 2 Nephi 22:2 probably has some advice for dealing with the opposition of mortality. 

2 Nephi 22:2 reads, "Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid; for the Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song; he also has become my salvation.

I think this is perfect for our mortal lives. We can trust and not be afraid of any of the opposition of mortality, because we know that Christ is our Lord, and that He has Redeemed us from everything and there is nothing we can´t overcome with His help. So the numbers actually worked in this case!

I don´t have my camera right now, so no pictures this week. I´ll have some next week though.

And for those of you who got the music reference in the subject:

I hope that this email is over...now

over...now

over...

now.

Lofthouse in Lisbon Chapter 12 - Festa Africana, with cake and apostacy

Living in Portugal is hard! I can´t turn on the sink without starting a fire! No, that´s actually true. Every time you turn on the water, the water heater turns on, and it uses a gas burner to heat the water, so when you use the sink, you hear the fire ignite. Here are some other things I have discovered about Portugal:

1-Pedestrians have the right of way. You can practically walk into the middle of the street anywhere and everyone will stop for you, or you can stand on the side of the road looking like you want to cross, and everyone will stop for you.

2-English slang is Portuguese slang. It´s kind of funny how much I hear the word freakin´ used by people here.

3-Portuguese bread is good. Like, really good.

4-There are three cultures here: Portuguese, Brazillian, and African. They´re all awesome and friendly. But the Africans take the prize for being the most open and friendly. We´ve had been come up to us and say hello and ask how we´re doing and if we need any help, and they just do it because they want to ask. It´s great.

And, whenever African members have parties, they invite the missionaries. I actually had no idea what was going on until about half way through (I´m always a little lost) but it was cool. There were about twenty people in one tiny house, and we had cake, and then one guy got out some champane (that´s the apostasy referred to in the subject). I think it was a birthday party for one of our investigators, but I´m still not quite sure. It was fun though.

Now, time for a fun scripture study moment I had. So, one day I was studying in Preach My Gospel, chapter 6, which is all about Christlike Attributes. I was reading the section on virtue, and I started counting the ways it lists that you can increase your virture.

1-focus on righteous, uplifting thoughts

2-put unworthy thoughts out of your mind

3-obey the commandments of God

4-follow the councel of church leaders

5-pray for strength to overcome temptation

6-pray for strength to do what is right

7-repent quickly of any wrongdoings

8-live worthy of a temple recommend.

8 is symbolic of rebirth in Hebrew. So this is like a formula for you to be spiritually reborn, in the sense of you becoming a more virtous person and leaving your vices behind. Then, the next day I was studying other things, and I ended up in D&C 88. Verse 67 talks about having an eye single to God and being filled with light. Verse 68 says, "Therefore, sanctify yourselves..." and I wanted to know more about sanctifying my self. So I looked at the foot note, and guess what it says? Man, Spiritually Reborn. And the way it worked out, this happened on the page next to the page where I had written a formula for spiritual rebirth! So those eight steps to virtue are how we can sanctify ourselves and recieve the promissed blessings in those verses (you´ll have to read them to find out what those blessigs are).

Anyway, that´s all for today. I went to a cool place called Quinta da Regaleira, and I got a bunch of pictures. I´m trying to get everything in a folder in Googel Drive for you all to be able to see. But it was super cool. It´s a big, old castle with lots of cool stuff around it.

Well, I love you all, and hope you all have a great week!

Lofthouse in Lisbon Chapter 11 - Totally Crazy

Tudo bem, yall! If you didn´t find the secret hidden in the last email, it was that my visa came! I might not have worked on phones, but on a computer, the first letters of the lines in the first three paragraphs had the message. Anyway, I got my visa and was flying from 8:30 Monday morning until 9:30 Tuesday morning. That might seem like a lot, but morning happens earlier here in Portugal, so it was only about 14 hours of flying. And upon arriving in Portugal, I discovered  few things that had never crossed my mind before. Never. I almost didn´t believe it. First, I don´t speak Portuguese. Who knew? I didn´t. Also, God answers prayers. I mean, I know that´s happened before, but who would have guessed that it would happen again? Just kidding, I knew both those things before. But in Washigton, when I got my visa, I prayed about my knew companion, and prayed that I would get a native Portuguese who would help me learn the language, but that he would also speak English. And I got not one, but two! I´m in a trio with Elder Carreira and Elder Braga. They´re both Portuguese, both speak English, and they are both totally crazy. In fact, all the people here are! Everyone is just kind of happy in a partially insane kind of way (especially the members) and everyone wants to help eachother and they are all super nice. We´ll knock on people´s door and say, "We´re representatives of Jesus Christ and have a message for you and your family." and they´ll say "I can´t talk right now, but you can come back tomorrow." It´s great! Oh, also, Elder Braga was visa waiting, too, and he´s going to be flying to Boston tomorrow. So my trio will be cut down to two, but Boston must need some Portugal-style joy (it´s like nothing we have in America).

Umm... I don´t really have anything to say. We walk around a lot, but I don´t have any cool stories yet, but I also don´t have any cool doctrine to share. This week has just been crazy. General Conference was good. I felt the Spirit, even though I didn´t understand much. Also, it was kind of funny becuase we sang "There is Sunshine in my Soul" for one of the hymns, and in the Portuguese Hymnal, it only has three verses, so when the fourth verse started, we just stood there awkwardly.

Anyway, I hope you all have a great week. I´m going to. I might even take pictures this week.

Amo vocês!