Week 93: May 27, 2019 - The Chair

Dear Family,

First off, my prayers go out to Aunt Darci and Christian. I hope they are doing well and that they are able to make a full recovery.

We had a huge conference this week. The whole south part of the Portugal mission met up in Oeiras... so, what would have been the Portugal Lisbon mission before they combined was all in one chapel. 

We went up to hear from Elder de Feo. Elder Haper and his companions Elder Erikson and Elder Powell came and picked me and Elder Terron up in their mission car. We all crammed in and drove up for a few hours. It was fun to talk to Elder Harper. He was telling me how much he felt that his mission has changed him. I thought it was so neat. It made me want to work harder and get that same sort of change within me. Conference was packed with the spirit. A few things stuck out to me:

• comparison is the thief of happiness
• our faith should first be in Jesus Christ, not in our determined outcomes, we should trust that He has a better plan for us even if things don't go the way we want them to
• trust in the spirit and be confident in its promptings, don't hesitate or doubt.

I feel like I need to work harder and forget myself more. I've been trying a lot harder to focus more on the work rather than anything else. I feel a lot more peace when I do that. 

I've continued with the just testify tactic. Once we start talking to someone, I don't ask if they have time, I just go right into our message. It has made missionary work so much more enjoyable and has led to many great conversations. We've placed like 3 Books of Mormon every day because of it. We found some good people to teach too. We have made some lists of people to visit with member lists and we have seen a lot of miracles from it. One of our investigators, Rafael, is doing so great! His wife is still holding on to the catholic church, but Rafael told me that he has shared talks with here from the church library app without saying that they were from the church, then that she got interested and liked it, and then he told her it was from the church. Not even a member and he is already a ninja missionary master!!! I loved that! Xenia, one of our other progressing investigators moved to Santo André. Bummer. She sent us a message that she was leaving and said bye. Elder Terron and I were saying how it sort of felt like she was breaking up with us! Tears may or may not have been shed.... Jk!!!! Hahaha! We passed her to the Elders in Santo André. She'll be taken care of, so that's good. Our other investigator that is progressing a lot is Ebenezer. He is awesome! He has doubts about the priesthood and the Book of Mormon. We had a super in depth talk about The Book of Mormon. It went great and he got super excited afterwards! He said he will keep praying and trying to gain a testimony.

Oh, last thing, Elder Terron gave me permission to send this: Tuesday night, we were looking for people on a list we made of investigators from the area book. We walked in a beautiful area actually. It was very peaceful, the sun was setting, and it had that Sunday night calm breeze feel. We got to someone's door at like 9 o'clock at night. A Brazilian man opened the door, he said his name was Jackson. He looked really tired, but he let us in. We walked in and there was another lady inside cooking dinner. We said hi to her and introduced ourselves. They had a small kitchen space with a table and 4 chairs. Jackson pointed to a chair and told Elder Terron to sit down. I happened to be looking in another direction when all of a sudden, I heard a huge crack and smash sound!!! I looked over and saw Elder Terron barely holding himself up with the widest eyes and mouth I'd ever seen him make! He had completely destroyed the chair! I was ready for them to go crazy on us and then they started laughing. You gotta love Brazilians man. He said that he had just put that chair back together and that it had already broken. He said that he had been meaning to throw that chair away, but never got around to it. We were laughing so hard, especially us as missionaries because we were so relieved that they reacted that way. We ended up having a great spiritual discussion. At the end, and pretty much the whole night, we left laughing so hard about the chair! We tried to go to sleep, but even when we were in bed, we couldn't stop laughing. Good times.
Love you all, have a great week!!
Elder Barton

That really nice neighborhood that I was talking about before the chair incident 

Elder Terron next to the famous chair

Us walking next to a Portimao lighthouse thing

Our zone, the Algarve Zone