This Was A Week of Milagres/Miracles

Elder Hunt's Zone at the Mission Christmas Party

This was one of the best and most interesting weeks of my entire life.

Monday-We played soccer in the morning, followed by email, then we made my Nana’s famous chocolate chip cookie recipe.  We realized our oven is broken...so we ended up making them in the microwave and they were delicious!!! We also found pasteurized milk! An extreme rarity here in Brasil! It also rained a ton in the night hours. We met a less active man who races Formula 1 cars and is OBSESSED with Michael Jackson.

Mission Christmas party

Tuesday-We woke up at 4am to get on a private bus to take us to the interior of Sao Paulo for our mission Christmas party! It was so fun! President Farnes gave 2 amazing firesides about bringing MORE souls unto Christ with the focus on baptism (that’s what I like to hear :)

Haka Haah

We had a talent show and my zone did the Haka haah, the Polynesian war dance, it was super fun! We had a present exchange and lunch and then ended back home late at night. 

Fireworks

Wednesday-Christmas Eve! It was wild. Holidays in Brasil are very crazy!!! All day people were lighting off fireworks and throwing firework bombs around! One of them was even thrown at us and we lost our hearing for a bit...Everyone rides their motorcycles; everyone is in the streets.  There are BBQs, music, and it is just pure craziness. It was getting dangerous enough that we went home a bit early because it was just getting too crazy.

Steak on the grill, Brasilian style

Christmas Eve 2014

All of us in our house decided for the fun of it, lets have a barbecue. So we went and bought all the stuff spur of the moment, then we got home and got started and spur of the moment again we decided that we should make a desert. 

 Elder Burt and I decided to make an Apple Crisp! An American classic!!!

That night we pulled our couch and table outside and ate out on our deck/patio. We ate like kings and enjoyed fireworks for hours on end. We sat perched at our little top of the world and just enjoyed the craziness of Brasil.

Christmas package from the Nissons and Trumans

I also received and opened a package from the Nisson and Truman families from my Anthem home ward in Las Vegas. It was filled with letters and treats and so many amazing things!!! I am so grateful for that! 

I will never forget this night and it will remain marked as one of the best nights I’ve ever had. 

Christmas package from his family

Thursday-Christmas!!! We woke up and we all open our Christmas boxes from our families! I also bought everyone a little something for Christmas too :)

After, we went to a huge breakfast a woman in the ward provided. Then we went to a huge lunch that someone in the ward provided. They even had ham and potatoes au gratin, food from home!!! It was great, but we definitely ate too much. 

After, we went to the chapel to skype our families! My comp went first and I went after because we only had one computer, but it was fast and good quality. But talking to everyone was AMAZING. Talking to everyone in my family absolutely made me the happiest missionary in the whole entire world! :) Everyone looked so good and was doing so well! It was hard to say goodbye, but that’s just the way it has to happen. 

Friday-We got back to work as usual. We found a family who had been previously taught a while back, we marked a lot of baptismal dates, and found a lot of new investigators. We have been working very hard and very smart, but I was still wondering why we are not having the success I want. 

Saturday-I thought very long and very hard about what was preventing us from having the success I wanted. I studied a ton about faith and ended up deciding to fast all of Saturday. I decided that this day I would work harder than I ever had and would show the most amount of faith that I ever had.

Rogerio on his baptism day

We went and taught many people and pushed through the blazing heat until we came to the house of a man named Rogerio. He is the nephew of a very strong member in the ward, but he’s been trying his hardest to repent of things he’s done in the past and start again as a new man. He is a single father who loves his son very much and we also found out that he has been to church many times.  We went to his house and began to teach about faith, repentance, baptism, the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end.

In a moment of pure faith, I invited him to be baptized...RIGHT ON THAT SAME DAY. He accepted the baptismal invite to be baptized on that very same day. We taught him about Joseph Smith and the Restoration, he was interviewed, and we baptized him that night. We showed the faith, it was in the midst of a difficult fast, and everything went right :) I could not have been happier. Jesus is the Christ and He lives.

Sunday-We woke up especially early to look for investigators to bring to church. We went to at least 10 different investigators houses, but no one was home...we had one investigator who came on his own, we took the sacrament and then went back out to look for more people.  Then we went to one house of a teenage boy who had been taught a while back, but didn’t even want to talk to us during the week when we went to visit him. 

After some waiting, he came out of his door and told us he wanted to be baptized today. I couldn’t believe it, but my faith was still there and we had another miracle. He was baptized later that day :)

Monday-We played a killer game of soccer this morning! It was super fun! 

This week was the week of learning how far faith can take you, believing, and working for what you know is right, this was a week of MILAGRES! (MIRACLES)

I love you all!

Elder Hunt