Dear Family,
So this week was a good week although it had its struggles.
First off, Elder Jensen, two weeks ago started to get a head eche, and it got worse and worse, so he stayed in for like three days this week and it is still really bad. I was on splits a lot trying to prepare these people for baptism this week (more on that later). He went to Mosterous of the north part of the island to the hospital there and they gave him some medicine with some nasty side effects so he stopped using that and we are going back in a few hours here because he has a check up earlytomorrow morning. Please pray for him and everyone here that is sick. I am on and off a tiny bit sick, but not bad, and it is nothing compared to what Elder Jensen has.
So this week we found some new investigators and stuff, especially in Figueira Pavao, our new area. We invited this guy to come to church and he said he would which is normal, but he actually showed up which isn´t that normal, and he brought an investigator with him which isn´t normal at all, and then it turned out that he hasn´t been baptized which is rare, and then a person who doesn´t speak very much Portuguese that we had been working with and had a marrage date who had stopped talking with us and was running from us weeks ago showed up in church miraculously, and so we can start working on that marrage now, and she offered a beautiful first prayer which had more words in it than I think she has ever said to us ever. We also had an investigator in church that already has had all the lessons and then moved into our area. We will be talking with him. He said he has a few doubts.
I love teaching people how to pray. It is great because they always offer prayers that are so sincere, simple and sweet. In a lot of cases, it is like they have been trying to talk to God for a while but didn´t know exactly how to do it. A lot of people here already know how to pray, but a bunch don´t really, and a few just had sort of made up their own thing.
So we had 4 baptisms this week scheduled, One of a little kid who was 8, his older brother, Lourenco who is 14, and Cristina who is 14. We did all the baptisimal interviews friday except for Cristinas, and we tried to find her, and couldn´t. We found out sunday, thanks to the help of our members, that she still wants to be baptized but is afraid of the ocean and so she is also shy and didn´t want to tell us so she just hid from us. We didn´t have the baptism in the ocean anyways because it is super steep to get there and the cars can only take like 10 people. We talked to Cristina today and we will talk with her more tomorrow and she should be baptized on Saturday. (Our chapel and font are under construction for the next 6 months) We ended up going to Sao Filipe to do the baptism. It was a good Baptism, except that after we got there, we did some simple math, and to the suprise of the mom, our 8 year old baptism was only 7. So, only Lourenco and Casey Johnny were baptized. It was still fantastic though. The were both confirmed on Sunday in church.
I was thinking about how baptism is like joining the Lords side in this war against Satan and sin. We can fight against satan before, but we don´t join the side of the Lord until baptism and don´t recieve the blessings of victory until we Join the Lord. When we recieve the gift of the Holy Ghost we get our ´´sword of the spirit´´ (ephesians6:17 i think) that we can use to guide us in this battle. We join the 2000 stripling warriors when we are extremely valliant and non of us will fall if we are like the stripling warriors in the end of Alma 56. Its good stuff. Challenge for everyone for the week is to read about and become more like the stripling warriors.
I love You all.
President and Sister Oliveira are coming out this week to do interviews and house inspections which means that we don´t have zone conference this transfer. I am excited, except that it is hard to clean your house really well with limited water so we will probably fail house inspections. Our water went out yesterday, and so we only have a little left coming from the sinks. I guess it will probably come back saturday, but that is just a guess.
Love,
Elder Sampson
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