September 10, 2012

When missionaries told me that the 2nd half of your mission always goes by a lot faster I am now seeing the truth of it. The week wasnt even the best that ive ever had and was even a little difficult but it still went by super fast.
Also as you can see in the pictures i got my 2 miami heat championship t shirts from my dad this past week and now I can rep it up in brasil as well. Gotta let everybody now who I root for and what team is the best even if they have no idea who it is.
So this week like I said was pretty tough and we didn't have a ton of results that we were able to see and we had a few disappointments with some realy great people were teaching but were keeping our heads up and battling on. Also on wednesday we had a multi zone conference which had all the missionaries in soracaba and itu together to have trainings from president and some other missionaries. And part of those "other missionaries" was me and Elder Maciel. We gave a training to about 50-60 missionaries on how to do contacts. It was a really neat experience but kind of weird at the same time. Especially because there was quite a few missionaries that got here with me or who are older and i was giving a training to them. But it went really well and i was able to learn a lot and hopefully the other missionaries learned from it as well. The good thing was that it wasnt all the missionaires together at the same time but was split up into 4 groups and we had 30 minutes with each group and we did practices and stuff. So it went really well. The worst part of the day was how long it took. we left at 6 in the morning and got home at 8 at night. Because to itu its about an hour and a half bus ride and we had to go with the bus schedules.
Also this week with the girl we have a baptismal date with I was able to see the true power that the Book Of Mormon has. She told us that she was going to wait on her baptism because she had a ton of doubts and everything about the church from stuff that she found on the internet that just talks trash about everything. But we told her to instead of looking on the internet for this stuff read the BOM and pray about it after every verse she read in the chapter we left. The next day at church we asked her if she did it and she said she did, we asked her if she could deny that it came from God and she said she couldnt, then we asked her if she would be baptized on the day we had marked and she said yes. All this because she sought the knowledge about these things with our Heavenly Father instead of with man. Its one of the things that i find really impressive about the church and the work we do as missionaries. We dont ask people to believe in what were saying or the Bishop or parents, no one. But to believe in what Heavenly Father will answer us through prayer. Heavenly Father, God, is the one that gave me an answer that this gospel and the BOM is true, not man. I love being a missionary and getting to see these miracles that happen with us and the people that we teach.


Eu Te Amo
Elder Gleason


P.S. Alma 32 (the chapter that helped the girl we´re teaching-especially verses 26-43) and 2 Chr 6:14; 14:11; 15:2