Barton Family News

We had a super neat district council this week! We talked about our President's letter and I got an answer to my prayers about confidence in God. We talked about how confidence in God comes from faith and how faith comes from doing good works. I realized how if I wanted more confidence in God, I needed to do more good things and act on promptings more.  We also have been teaching Tiago more. He is so awesome!!! He is understanding everything super fast! When we teach, I notice how the Spirit just takes control and teaches so well!!! Way better than I could. I notice how I'm actually learning too during our discussions. We also had an awesome thanksgiving lunch!!!! We ate with the other missionaries and the Manns. It was so much fun!!! They even made a bunch of gluten free stuff for me!!! They are so nice!!!  I made some desserts for the meal too. I made no bake cookies and an apple crisp thing, yes, all gluten free!!! I guess you could say Im becomi...

Dear Family, We had a couple conferences this week that were super amazing!!! I loved hearing President Fillmore, our mission president, speak. He follows the spirit so well!!! A couple things I took out of the conferences:  1) In Moses 1:39, it talks about God's purpose-immortality and eternal life of man. Immortality is the quantity, everybody gets that, and eternal life is the quality. That's where we as missionaries come in. We are here to enhance other people's lives and eternity. 2)You can tell someone is being converted to Christ's gospel by the way they serve others. It really was a neat conference! It was actually pretty funny, because we did a transmission with the members on one of the other islands, so we had to use a broadcast system. The microphones had to be put together so that the other people could hear. One of the leaders during the conference came up and duck taped it all together so that it could stay up. It looked like it is in the photo bel...

Dear Family, How are you all doing?!?!?! There seemed to be a huge theme on confidence this week. I have struggled a lot with that. God has used many of his angels to help me learn and grow and one of the things He wanted me to learn was confidence in the spirit and in me.  I'm still learning, but I feel like I am taking footsteps. This week, I felt inspired to talk about baptismal invites in our district council. We came up with three different obstacles that we could face when inviting someone to be baptized and then practiced confronting those obstacles. That day, Elder Ray and I did splits with the elders on the other side of the island to work in their areas and also for me to interview an investigator for the sisters, Donária, and an investigator for the elders, Antônio.  We got to the sister's appointment early. I was with Elder Zamora and he knew the family of Donária, they were members, so we went on in and waited for the sisters and got to know them. Literally th...

Dear Family, I know you are all wondering, so yes, they do celebrate Halloween here. We had a dinner with a member named Maria da Paz and her husband Bernardino and we ate rabbit!!! It was actually super good!!! At the end of the dinner, a few times when trick-or-treaters came by, I surprised them by answering the door and giving out pass along cards and then Maria da Paz giving out candy. It was pretty funny to see the people react as a missionary opened the door! Maria got a good kick out of it. The people liked it and asked for more to give to their family.  We also went out and visited a ton of people with Bernardino. He is a BOSS!!!! Everyone on the island knows him!!!! Everyone let us in no problem and was so open. We visited a lot of less active members. I noticed how the spirit was so strong and it seemed super easy to know exactly what the people needed to hear. The spirit is always so strong when we go out to teach with members. We actually had a lot of less active ...