Week 83: March 22, 2019 - Blessings of Rain

Dear Family,

Well another marvelous week gone by.

Elder Doughman and I are still having amazing adventures here together in Benfica.
We had more time to visit some people in our area book. We got to visit this one person named Joel. He was super awesome!!! He let us in and we sat down by his cousin while he was playing a video game. Joel had already talked to the missionaries before we found him. We got to talking and it seemed to get more and more comfortable the more we got to know each other. We showed him and his cousin a video from the church media channel on their tv called blessings of rain (I think in English). We asked them at the end what they learned. They said how they didn't understand the video. I think that was fault on my part. I should have explained it better to them before. But, it seemed like we were able to pick it up after. I tried to open them up a bit more and asked them what blessings they would like to receive. Joel said intelligence and more time to relax. His cousin was pretty funny; he said, "I want to be able to stay home all my life and play video games!" It would have been nice to say that God can bless us with anything we desire, but... Im sure I don't need to go further. hahaha! We told them how as we keep the commandments, God will bless us with what we need and will help us find joy in this life and the life to come. We bore our testimony to them about the Book of Mormon and challenged them to read it from the beginning. Because of that challenge, I got super excited and decided to restart and read from the beginning with them.Its neat to see that there are things that I still hadn't noticed from the time I read before and how there are always more things God can teach us from the same verses of scripture.

Love you all so much!!!! Hope you have an amazing week!!!!
Love,
Elder Barton

PS here are some photos form preparation day; we toured a Buddhist garden. It was super pretty!!! And yes, we did get goofy with the statues!!!

We have this tradition that we just started where at the end of the transfer, we open one of those surprise chocolate kinder eggs and we open to a random scripture that predicts what will happen our next transfer or what it will be like. The kinder egg toy is supposed to give more meaning to the scripture. This was the scripture that I opened to and I really liked it!!! 1 Timothy 1:12 and I got a toy Jeep