It is weird to think that I will be done with my mission in somewhere between 52 and 58 weeks (with the whole missions combining they still don't know what they are doing for my group, they aren't worrying about us yet)
Anyways so my new companion is named Elder Randall Ellsworth. He is from Orem Utah, is 22 years old and was in the Marines before his mission. He has been out 1 year and 9 months now and only has 2 more transfers left before he goes home. He is probably one of, if not my favorite companion right now because he has been showing me how to have fun and be a zone leader at the same time. The way our mission is, the Zone Leaders are generally stressed most of the day about their investigators or their zone, and there is always a problem. Elder Washburn was a fanatic about the numbers and worked as hard as he could to get the number goals. Elder Ellsworth has come in to renew that love of service by saying that there are 3 things we need to remember as leaders:
1. Never judge someone on how many baptisms they have, only judge them on how close they are to Christ. (here it is a baptism game in such a lot of missionaries have lost focus of the real prize)
2. If you are not having fun, you ARE doing something wrong
3. always ask yourself and your Zone at the end of the day do you feel like you were walking with Christ today?
He is my first companion that has been able to explain to me what president Torgan has been trying to say. I didn't understand that in the way it is translated it doesn't sound quite right in English, but in Portuguese, it works great. President Torgan has told us that the faithful will see Christ, but we have to go to him. the first step is to walk with Christ during our day and have him there and talking to him when we can, in this way we can get constant revelation, as well as resist sin a lot easier. The next step is to let Christ teach the lessons while we only testify to what he says. That way we won't have to worry about our teaching, christ will do it (plus he teaches a lot better) We have a promise that our tounge will be filled with the words, so we should live up to that promise. The final step is to thank him when he does that. It is a lot easier said than done, but it makes more sense now than what it did when President Torgan was saying it, just some of the phrases are still strange for me.
This week was basically a week of just just finding and passing by people. I can't think of anything special, except that I got to go to Seixal for Church to talk to the bishopric. The bishopric was refusing to confirm a baptism of the Irmãs, so I got to go and speak to them as a Zone Leader. I took Elder Jones with me (he one of the other elders in my apartment). So I sat down, talked to him, and then I had some other problems to resolve there, and then we had the sacrament and left, so I only had to go to church for 10 minutes on Sunday. It was funny, since transfers changed everything up. In Seixal there are already 2 duplas there (1 irmãs and 1 elder dupla) and then elder Jones and I was there, so everyone was super confused why 6 missionaries were at church, it was really funny.
all in all, it was fun. Love y'all
Elder Hope
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