Dear família!
Happy 4th of July! People here were celebrating with fireworks too...just they weren't celebrating our independence day,.... they were celebrating brasil´s win. :)
So on Tuesday we met Presidente Castro. He has the standard works memorized! He was just popping off scriptures like nobodies business!! He is very spiritual too. He is really cool. From his training I picked up a few things about him. 1. he loves the scriptures. 2. he will enforce the rules because obedience is important to him. 3. Studying daily is key. 4. He is not all about baptizing just to baptize. Yes, he wants to baptize a lot but he is not the guy that is going to be ok with missionaries just throwing people in the water. I think that he will enforce the qualifications for baptism. When one of the elders who is a big baptizer asked him what he thought about our goal of 12000 baptism for the year and spreading the work he told a story about when he served a mission and him and his comp went to an interior and taught a whole town of 5000 people. They called president and told him they were going to baptize the whole town. President said no way because there was no way those 5000 people were going to stay firm in the church because there was no church there. He was transferred immediately. So he didn´t answer the question directly but we got the point:) He isn´t just going to be sending missionaries out to start the church in rural cities here. I got that he wants us to baptize the right way.
We did a division this week with one of the DL in out zone. I went to their area with the junior comp. I helped him see that obedience is important and to stop listening to music. In that house there are 4 elders so the next morning I went on a run with another elder. He is a beast! He was Elder Pothier´s comp in the states when they served there. After we finish here at the lan house we are going to go over there and have a churrasco!! Gonna be super fun.
This week we had 2 baptisms, on Saturday Ká got baptized. I don´t remember if I talked about her last week. We met here 2 months ago and didn´t want anything to do with us when we met her. Now she has totally changed and desired to baptize.
Yesterday after church, E* was baptized. He is the brother of one of the members in the ward. He was taught by missionaries 6 months ago but never got baptized because he traveled. So he was baptized yesterday. I only taught him 2 times before he was baptized. It is because Elder Volk went there when we were on divisions. So really we taught him 5 times but I was only there for 2 so to me it was kind of weird at the baptism because it felt like I really hadn´t done anything. Elder Volk told me that in one of the lessons they read the BOM and he had really good questions. I have no doubt that he will stay firm in the church. His brother in law baptized him. He is the skinnyer one in the picture.
After church we had a ward council meeting. It was soo good!!!! Our first councilor in the bishopric is the best. He conducted the meeting and the meeting was pretty much us going over the mission plan of the ward. He assigned each organization to bring to the bishopric their plan to find people for the missionaries to teach (it is part of the plan) then we designated a time for the baptisms to take place every week. It was a great meeting. I love this ward and I do not want to leave! I forgot to tell that to pres castro to day in my email. I´ll tell him next week.
Well that was our week. It was a good week:) We have a date marked with Ro for this Thursday. He has known the church for over 2 years but could never baptize because his girlfriend wouldn´t let him. Now she is out of the picture so he is all for it! He is 18. I´m pretty excited for his baptism:)
I also played piano again and did so so . The sacrament hymn was I Stand all Amazed. The first time I played it was right then. I just played the top hand. The chorus was bad... but it was singable:) PRACTICE YOUR PIANO!
Have a great week. Oh and my brothers are BEASTS!!!!! Slalom skiing ,,, I never did try that out. Benson, Christian would be very proud of you:) Have a great week.
Elder Ostler
Vamos Brasil!!
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