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
No comments:
Post a Comment