Hope for the future

Olà!

Tudo Bem! Estou a pensar como eu posso contar o que aconteceu essa semana. Foi um semana muito comprido. Mais ainda esta muito quentinho e estamos a receber muito sol. Basicamente mais uma semana em paraiso.

Well this week was really long so I guess I will start from the beginning. We drove up to Lisbon on Tuesday to trade companions and get everything settled. The plan was that I was going to trade Elder Jan for Elder Martel and that we were going to head right back to Loulé and get to work that night. They called us 15 minutes after we left Loulé and told us that I was actually going to be staying there in Lisbon until Friday because Elder Martel still hadn't received his driver's license in Portugal yet. The only clothes I had were the clothes on my body... oh joy. That drive I was cramped in the back seat between luggage and the car wall. We finally arrived in Lisbon. I traded Elder Jan for Elder Martel and we were taken to the mission office. We dropped off the stuff that we didn't need and we went to Mem Martins (the old area of Elder Martel) to work for the day. We didn't have a plan for the day.  We just went to work and talked to everyone we could in the street. That was a hot day and my clothes just smelled great afterwards. The next day, we went to the mission office and elder Martel did a lot of stuff there to prepare to get his Carta de Conduizão. I stayed there all day and waited for them to come back from CEF. Turns out that you can't take out a carta de conduizão in Portugal with an expired visa. So at 7:15, we received permission to finally return to our area (the bus to our area left at 7:30). We barely made it in time. After a four hour and a half bus ride, we finally arrived in our area. 

Now that we don't have a car it's a little bit harder for us to work because our area isn't Loulé.  We work in Quarteira and Albufeira. And the Bus tickets are really expensive and take a lot more time. The last buses that return to Loulé are really early in the night so we have to work really closely with members to arrange rides and everything so we can stay in our area until 9:30. We have basically been planning how we are going to be able to do this without a car and with the limited money that we have. We did the math and we might not have enough for food next week. It's alright I was gaining weight anyways.

We have been talking with everyone and we have a lot of hope for the future. The Lord does not give challenges that we can not over come. He knows our capacity and potential. Our capacity might not be our potential right now but he knows what we need so that our capacity can grow and we can live to our fullest potential possible.

 

Beijinhos,

Elder Fogg

Missão Portugal Lisboa

Baptism Pics

Baptism!!

Olà Tudo otimo?!?!

Estou muito feliz aqui! Essa semana ajudamos duas mulheres a aproximarem-se a Cristo através de batismo! Foi uma experiencia tão bom. Espero que tudo esteja bom em casa também!

This week we had a baptism of our amigas Esmeralda and Salva. They were really excited. I was a little excited too apparently. Salva is a little bit scared of water and to be baptized you need to be immersed completely in the water. So when I was doing the ordinance, I did it really fast to make sure that she made it completely under the water. When I did it really fast, apparently I did it really forcefully too and it was pretty much like the front three rows at Sea World #SplashZone. Elder Tester and Elder Souza joked that they hope that she remembers the baptism even though it was so forceful. They said they hope the trauma wasn't too much for her head. But she made it under in the first try. 

This Sunday we had a lunch after church. People were pretty excited and brought a lot of food. Elder Souza brought brownies and everyone know wants his brownie recipe (they were soo goooooood). This lunch was combined with a training for the members on missionary work and family history. We are developing a program here in our ward called MMTC (Member Missionary Training Center). We are basically helping members reach out to there friends to share the gospel or to help them make new friends in sharing the gospel. It went well. People were pretty tired by the end of it being fast Sunday and all.

This week is transfers. Everyone at church was pretty sad the Elder Jan was leaving (and that I was staying). Everyone here likes Elder Jan a lot.  He has been here for 6 months (since I entered the MTC -- that's a long time). He is leaving for Pova.  He is going to be serving with Elder Davis from my MTC District. Elder Tester is leaving too. Elder Souza (this is his last transfer) is staying and another Brazilian is going to be his companion. I am going to be companions with Elder Martel! The same Elder Martel from the MTC, he is super cool. I am staying her in Loulé for at least one more transfer. Until Next week.​

Pics - General Conference

No, I don't work at IKEA

Olà tudo bem!?!?!

Essa foi uma boa semana. Espero que vocês estejam bem em casa. Tivemos muito sol então nos estamos muito felizes aqui.

Not much happened this week. We had Zone conference, so we got to see all the missionaries that are serving here in the Algarve. President Tavares and the assistants gave a training on goals. We apparently are really, really bad with our goal setting.  They keep giving trainings about it. I hope that we are getting better. Our goals need to be within reach but also need to stretch us so that we can grow. They gave a funny demonstration of this. They had one Elder run from one side of the chapel to the other side and at first they gave him a minute to do it.  He accomplished it easily. Next they gave him 3 seconds.  It was a little bit harder but he still got it. Lastly, they gave him 1 second. He wasn't even close. President talked to us about how we are disciples of Christ and we need to show it in our studies and in our prayers.  These are definitely 2 things I need to work on.

An Ikea opened in our area this week and on opening day a lot of people went to see what was up there. We went there to eat hot dogs. A lot of people were there.  It was really busy. As the others were buying their hot dogs, I was standing a little ways away from the group and I was wearing a yellow tie. Because the colors of Ikea are blue and yellow and because I am so attractive, an elderly Portuguese man walked up to me and started speaking to me. He asked me «What is up stairs?». I thought this was strange that someone wanted to talk to a missionary in Ikea and ask what they had upstairs. So I replied «I don't know I think it's Ikea upstairs too». This happened three more times and I thought each time, wow people at Ikea really want to hear our message. After the third time someone stopped me and asked me something about the store, I realized that the people weren't interested in the gospel, they thought I worked there. Awkward.

General Conference was this week. I hoped you all got to watch it. I just want to point out a couple trends that I noticed. The Apostles really want us to study «The Living Christ». I have never read this article by the apostles and prophets given to celebrate the 2000 year since the Savior's birth. I am going to read it and I challenge all of you too to read it as well.

Beijinhos,

Elder Fogg

Missão Portugal Lisboa

Work continues in Portugal

Olà rudo Bem!

Espero que tudo esteja bem consigo, é muito bom aqui. Essa semana foi muito frio e nos tivemos muito chuva também. Mas foi uma mais semana no paraíso.

We had a little bit of an awkward moment this week. We met up with Alice this week.  (She is a person we have marked for baptism.)  We had a really good lesson with her where we basically cleared up all her doubts and concerns and helped her feel more firm for her baptism. Later that night right before we were going to leave to work, we got a call from our branch president. He told us to call the mission office because he had a membership number but didn't have a name and he wanted to see if they could find out who it was. So we called the mission office but they didn't have access to those types of things. We called the branch president back and told him that they didn't have access. He then told us that he had found a baptism sheet from 1990s and he asked us to guess who it was. Well it turns out that the person we had marked for baptism was baptized in 1990 with all her kids, lol. We went to tell her that we found her baptismal sheet and asked if she remembered her baptism. She was as surprised as we were when we told her that she had already been baptized. 

I think we can all draw two lessons from this story. First don't baptize people that have already been baptized. If they have already been baptized by someone who holds the priesthood authority of God that was restored to Joseph Smith on May 15, 1829 that first time was good enough. Second, make sure the people you are baptizing know what they are doing. If they don't understand the covenant they are making with the Lord, you probably didn't do a good job of explaining it's importance and they probably shouldn't be baptized. 

Besides teaching and marking people that have already been baptized for baptism, we actually helped people that have not been baptized previously for baptism. We have been teaching a family from Africa. The father Barbosa is from Angola, the mother Esmaralda is from Mosambique, the grandma Salva is from Angola too and they have a kid Rafael who is adorable. Barbosa was already baptized but he wants his wife to be baptized too. They are not married and Esmaralda wants a big wedding. The problem with big weddings is that they require big money. We told them that all they have to do is be married by law and then she can be baptized, but she really wants to have a big wedding. We took this time to teach about temples and eternal families. We taught that this civil marriage pales in comparison to the eternal one. That the one that she should feel like a queen is when she will be sealed to her husband for time and all eternity. They really like that and she is working to be civilly married as soon as possible.

Beijinhos,

Elder Fogg

Setting Goals

Olà Tudo Bem!

I hope everything is great at home. Like always it was another hot and sunny week in paradise. 

As a mission we have been working really hard at setting goals. This whole transfer all the training has been about setting better goals. President talks a lot in his letters he writes to us about the power of setting goals. We have been working recently about how we can set inspired goals for the key indicators and also how we use smaller goals to reach those bigger ones. I don't know if I already told this story but when I first got here I was really scared of talking to people in the street. The idea of walking up to a stranger and trying to ''talk'' to them in a foreign language that I didn't even know that well wasn't that appealing but as missionaries our purpose is to help people come closer to Christ and we do that by opening our mouths. So I set a small goal with my companion Elder Thompson that I was going to try to talk to 15 people everyday. That was really hard at first but after the first week I had done 75 contacts. I felt really good; I could actually see my progress. So the next week I set a goal to do 25 contacts a day. I tried really hard to meet that goal. It was really awkward sometimes because I didn't know what to say or what others were saying but I knew that if I tried I was doing my part. By the end of the week I had done 150 contacts. I still need to improve how I do the contacts in the street but now talking to people is less scary and now I am fulfilling my purpose as a missionary and opening my mouth.

This week we had a hard time finding new people to teach. The people we had been teaching had started to run into more and more problems and were showing less real intent. We were out on a division with the Branch President Rui. We were going to visit an amiga whose baptism is next week but she wasn't home and she wasn't answering her phone. So we started taking him back to his house. He asked us what he could do to help us and we told him that we need more references from the members. He whipped out his phone and started calling his friends. He made three appointments for us and then he told us to park the car, so we got out and walked into a barber shop and he asked the barber if she could meet with us (he is friends with her), and she said yes. Then we ran into another one of his friends on the street and he set up another appointment with her. That was more efficient than doing missionary work on our own for 3 days. Later that week he went out with us when he wasn't planning on it previously.  We visited a couple members and amigos for 3 hours with him. Rui is basically the third missionary we have in Quarteira. When we work with members we use the Lord's time more efficiently. 

The Book is blue the church is true. Until next week.

  

Beijinhos,

Elder Fogg