 |
| Elder Lofthouse visited an aviation museum for P-day today |
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
No comments:
Post a Comment