Happy St. Patrick´s Day! Obviously they don´t have this holiday here, but I am in a ward with two other American missionaries so we remembered what today is. Today is also the three year anniversary from when I got the call saying I was accepted into grad school at UCSB :) I can´t believe it has already been so long. Life is passing too quickly!
This week
will be an exciting one because on Wednesday I will complete 1 year
& 3 months in the mission and Thursday we will have zone conference
with President & Sister Gaertner here in Palmas with us. I am
looking forward to the zone conference!
Last week
turned out much better than we thought it would. We were worried because
the first couple of days during the week weren´t super productive and
then we traveled to Gurupi on Wednesday to go on exchanges with the
sisters there. Gurupi is 3 & a half hours away by bus and for some
reason I got pretty sick on the way there. Once we got off the bus I got
better, but man, I feel like the 12 hour busride to Brasília passes
faster than the few hours on the bus. I must admit, though, that the
view was amazing. I have never seen so much open land and greenery!! I
thought the busride to Miracema was gorgeous, but the one to Gurupi has
it beat by a longshot. I am pretty sure within that three hour busride I
saw enough land to fit millions and millions of people. It was so vast
and open! I took pictures but they don´t even capture one one-hundredth
of what I was seeing.
Some cool
stories from this past week, on Friday night the sisters in Miracema had
a baptism for a young man named Mateus. How they found Mateus started
with a simple contact Sister P. Gonçalves and I made when I was on
exchanges there in the beginning of February. It was 7:30pm and all of
the appointments she planned had fallen through. We didn´t have anyone
else to visit so we prayed to know which street to walk down and said we
would talk with everybody we saw in the street. We decided on the next
street up and right as we turned down it we saw a woman out front of her
house. She was leaving to go to school but we stayed in the front and
talked with her three kids, the oldest one being 14 and the youngest 7.
Sister P. Gonçalves marked to go back the next week and when she did,
their friend Mateus was visiting. They met Mateus, invited him to
church, and the rest is history :) It is amazing how a simple contact
led them to one of the Lord´s elects. No effort is wasted!
Sister
Timario and I also found how true this statement is. Friday night we
received a referral from our neighbor. Her friend who lives in São Paulo
called to say her cousin, Karol, lives in our area. They passed her
address to us and Saturday we went to find Karol. We got to the
apartment complex and went to the address we had. Well, Karol didn´t
live there. We felt so strongly we needed to find her so we thought we
would try the other buildings at that complex. Her apartment number was
203 so we knocked every apartment 203, luckily there were only 8
buildings. The whole time I just kept thinking, "Heavenly Father, we are
doing our best. We dont have a phone number to call her or any other
address." In my heart I felt like we would be blessed for the effort we
were making. We finished knocking all the doors and still didn´t meet
Karol. We figured we would have to ask our neighbor to call her friend
and verify the address.
Sunday
morning came and as I was getting ready for church I decided to watch
some Mormon Messages I have in Portuguese on a DVD. One message caught
my attention called "Domingo Virá" which means Sunday Will Come. The
message talked about the Friday when Christ was crucified and how the
circumstances seemed so bleak. Our Friday this past week was honestly
terrible...I dont know what went wrong but Friday was horrible, Saturday
was a little better and there I was, Sunday morning. Most of our
investigators Saturday night had said they wouldn´t be able to make it
to church so the prospects at church weren´t making me too excited.
Saturday night I had written in my planner that one of my goals for
Sunday was to have more faith. I tried to start but it was hard. Like I
said last week, Sundays make or break the week.
I
know this email is ridiculously long so I will sum up how great Sunday
was. We walked by the young women´s room 10 minutes before church
started and saw a young woman sitting alone. We went to introduce
ourselves and guess who it was...Karol!! She came to church on her own
because she had seen the church and knew where it was. We also had two
other investigators there for the first time, ones we thought wouldn´t
come this week! I was so happy my heart wanted to burst with joy! The
rest of the day was marvelous as well.
Just
remember, regardless of what happens on Friday, Sunday will come. This
was a message I learned this week. Here are some quotes from the talk
and the link to the message.
"Each of us will have our own Fridays—those days when the universe
itself seems shattered and the shards of our world lie littered about us
in pieces. We all will experience those broken times when it seems we
can never be put together again. We will all have our Fridays.
But I testify to you in the name of the One who conquered death—Sunday
will come. In the darkness of our sorrow, Sunday will come.
No matter our desperation, no matter our grief, Sunday will come. In this life or the next, Sunday will come."
Hope you are all happy and healthy!! Thank you for being the best family ever! :)
Love,
Sister Kerr
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