This week was good! I am feeling great! About the rainy season.... to be honest I don´t understand this whole rainy season thing at all because everyone says different things about it, and it pretty much just rains a ton all the time, haha. But right now it is no longer açaí season so that is sad..... apparently it will come back soon. Everyone in brazil is obsessed with açaí because it´s super good and apparently it´s also super healthy. And the best açaí in brazil is from Amazonas, of course.
So yesterday before church was way crazy. 99.999% of the crazy things that happen here happen sunday before church, when we are trying to bring investigators to church. So on saturday we taught a family (a single mother and her three boys) that we have been teaching for about a week. On saturday we taught about keeping the Sabbath day holy, and they lesson was pretty much perfect. We left everything perfect for everyone to go to church the next day. They would all wake up at 6:00 to get ready, and we were going to walk with them to church around 8:00. Awesome.
But like my companion always says, every sunday morning before church we have to fight face to face with satan.
When we got to their house, everyone was all dressed up and ready to go. But when we were about to leave, the mom looked at her door and noticed that her padlock was missing. Uh oh. She said she couldn´t leave her house without locking it, because it had already been robbed three or four times during the day. So we decided to do the impossible. We told her we would find a padlock for her to use, and that we would return shortly. We first thought to call the bishop and the counselors to ask them if they had an extra padlock. But then, to our horror, we realized that our cell phone didn´t have any more minutes. We went to two or three houses of members who lived close by, but they either didn´t have a padlock or had already gone to church. It was then we remembered that our apartment has a padlock! Duh! We ran back to our apartment, got the lock, returned, and tried to close the door with the lock.
It was too big for the chain. Freak.
Also, the mom said that her son had left and gone to another church that he usually goes to. After we said to him that we would come back to bring them to church. Freak.
We asked her if she could go talk to her son in the other church so they could go to church all together. And while she did that we would find a smaller lock.
So then we went to another investigator´s house (we were already pretty late) to bring her to church. And guess what was on her house. A smaller padlock! Élder Fernandez put the big lock through the chain, and it worked! So we asked her dad if we could switch the locks, just for the day, and that it was a long story but he would be helping us a ton. haha. So we switched the locks.
We went back to the first house, to find that the mom and her son who went to church weren´t there. But another boy was there. "She is looking for her son, because he didn´t actually go to church. He went there and left his bible there and left. She said that it wouldn´t work out for her to go to church today."
No.
Satan couldn´t win.
We started walking/running like crazy people to the other church. They weren´t there. We went back, and then we finally saw them on the street. The mom was really mad at her son, who apparently had done this before, pretending he was at church when he really wasn´t. She told us that she was really mad, and that she wasn´t in the right state of mind to go to church.
No.
We started to talk to her. We showed her the lock. We told her that she needed to go to church now more than ever, and that satan was doing everything possible for her not to go to church. I asked her if she believed that the Book of Mormon is true. She said yes. I said that satan doesn´t want her to go to church, because he knows that she knows that the Book of Mormon is true. And that he knows that she knows that that huge church in the "downtown" part of Manacapuru is the only true church in the whole city.
She thought for a couple of minutes.
"Put on your shoes, we´re going to church."
Long story short: unfortunately we didn´t bring 35 people to church. We´ll save that one for next time. But what happened ended up being a huge victory. That family went to church, they all loved it, and the son that escaped from the other church didn´t even try to escape from the true church, because he loved it there.
And once again, two very sweaty missionaries arrived very late to church. :)
THE END
Love, Elder Olivier
Me in my new hammock, because all the cool kids these days sleep in hammocks
Élder Fernandez and I in an alley
Me with a cashew (that´s what a cashew fruit looks like, the grayish part on top is the nut part that you all know and love)
Here are some family home evenings that we went to this week too.....!!!!!
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