A Week of Excellence

Oi Minha Familia!!

Oh how I miss you all! It´s been a good week. It´s been crazy. We´ve worked sooo hard and everyday I come home exhausted and sore. haha It´s good to feel that again tho. :) 

We had a week of excellence and Tiago, our WML gave us $20 to celebrate! haha he´s SO good to the missionaries and he said it´s been almost a year since any of his missionaries have gotten a week of excellence. So, tomorrow we´re buying Açaí!!! haha Anyway... it´s been good. 

John (the American) baptized her in Portugese :)

Baptism of Norma!

This week we worked with Norma. She´s a referral from a member in our ward (the American and his wife!) She´s 72 and has been smoking for 58 years. She smoked about 40 a day. This week she went from about 20 a day to none! She is incredible. She was baptized yesterday and was so happy. After her interview with the District Leader, he came out and said she was ready to be baptized and she started jumping up and down. She cried and hugged us all as we all cried and jumped up and down too! I´ve never seen someone so excited to be baptized!! She was a blessing in our lives this week. She is an example to us all of true conversion and change. This week also, Alcides received the priestood! It was a happy Sunday. :)

We´ve been working hard to find new people to teach because a lot of our investigators have fallen through. This week, as I said, we worked SO hard and we found 18 news! haha That´s definitely ... well... that´s never happened before. haha 

Things are good. It gets hard sometimes but I´ve had to learn to just push thru and keep working. The harder you work, the faster the days seem to go, and the easier it is to find the joy. It´s weird tho, how that works. Because sometimes you´re sad because you just want to take a break and watch a movie or take a nap. But when you really find yourself working your hiney off - that´s when the joy comes. Though, this morning was the very first time I´ve taken a nap on Pday. haha! I didn´t mean to. This picture about sums it up. haha Thank you Sister Loss. :) 

Here's a cool Lion King sunset for you!!

Anyway. Like I said, it´s been good. The Portuguese is good, the home is good, the comp is good. :) I hope things are all good for you too! Thank you for your emails!!!

Drea