It's true, fasting works

Hello,

For the first time in my mission, investigators will be getting married to get baptized! Mario who is the companion of Paula, is going to get married to her so that they he can get baptized. That has never happened. Usually when we bring up getting married to people, they usually laugh in our faces or it ends up falling through. This time they told us that they wanted to get married as fast as possible. O Registro Civil is the fastest way that they can get married, so we went there on Monday. There they told us that you have to make 2 appointments. 1. an appointment to set up the date of the real marriage and to get all the paper work done before hand (all the documents and stuff). 2. the actual marriage that takes place. Usually, they told us, you have to make these things way in advance, like a month in advance to do the first appointment and then another month before the actual marriage. Plus these months of August and September are filled with people wanting to do these marriages. They had no time but they told us to come back on Friday because the lady that does all the marriages was actually on holiday and wouldn't get back until Friday. So we left with little hope. Almost in passing I suggested that we do a fast.  It was a systematic reaction. I didn't think it would result in anything close but maybe they would find a little time toward the end of September or something.

Well on Friday we were doing weekly planning and as we were making plans for the people we are teaching, our phone rang. It was Mario, he started talking to us all excited. They had done the fast and we had done it too. We still hadn't finished but we were going to finish it with our lunch, in a couple of hours. Well he told us that they had found time, and that the marriage was marked for the 28th. I thought, the 28th of October or September? He told us, the 28th of August! I couldn't believe it. It had worked. I was so surprised! But it's true, fasting works.  Now they are going to get married on the 28 and he'll be baptized the same day. It's going to be real great. 

Hope you all are doing well.

Élder Fogg

Miracle...FOOD

This week we had a lot of fun. Found a lot of cool people. Saw some cool stuff. It was great. This week we had a miracle on Wednesday. We had been working hard and had made a lot of appointments with the members. Basically what happened was that all of them thought that we made the appointment with them to eat food. So we ended up having 3 meals that were not made by missionaries, Lunch, Dinner and a post Dinner snack. It was really good. I now know what it's like to serve in Utah... I'm kidding. That was a joke. But it was really a great blessing.

 

This week was not the easiest one.

Fun stuff happened this week.

Spiritual thought: In D+C 121 it says «Meu filho, paz seja com tua alma, sua adversidade e tuas aflições não durarão mais que um momento; e então se suportares bem, Deus te exaltará no alto» verses 7 and 8. Here I won't go over the background about what was happening with Joseph Smith when he received this counsel, I'll just use these words he gave to one servant at one time as the same counsel he gave to other servants in another time. This week was not the easiest one. We worked real hard, did our best and not much came about. But as God told his servant Joseph, paz seja com tua alma, we also need to see that the trial of our faith won't be forever, it will end. This week we ended our trial with our own action. We said basically «well this week sucked, but next week can be better if we make it better». Instead of looking back and gnashing our teeth at the past, we looked forward. We started making a lot of appointments with members and things started to roll from there to the point where yesterday 3 people told us they wanted to be baptized.  We hadn't even said anything. Paz seja com tua alma... se surportares bem, Deus exaltará no alto. 

Funny experience: There's this huge catholic party going on in the middle of our city. (background the Catholics during the summer just throw a lot of parties in all their cities until the end of summer. It's interesting, but any hoo)  Yesterday, they started it off with a grand processional of this statue going through the city. Our plans took us straight through the festival. It was crazy. I'll send pictures of what they had set up for this thing but as we were walking through just trying to get to the other side, we ran into 1. an investigator that was walking in the parade, and 2. a less active member. At that moment on I thought, well we need to teach the restoration little bit better. 

Élder Fogg