Sunday, July 8, 2012

June 26, 2012


This is the last week with President Pavan. He and his wife are leaving on Saturday and President Wright will arrive to take over. We are going to have a conference to get to know him and his wife on the 4th of July. I am excited to see what sort of inspirations and experiences he will bring to help the Lord with His work. President Pavan was neat to be around and I felt a powerful Spirit from him and his wife during the one conference I had with him.
We are scheduled to have 3 baptisms this Saturday of three girls - Daniele (14), Caroline (12), Aline (11). The parents are waiting on their birth certificate papers to marry and when that occurs, they will be baptized as well. This family lives directly above us. They moved into the house in March and Elder Richardson has been teaching them the whole time. There are seven children in total which is a huge family here. Basically unheard of from my experience so far. Most families seem to have 2-3 children. We are teaching two young men, Robert (18) and Mateus (14). We were looking for a previous contact and encountered them. After a visit on Friday the 15th they arrived at church the 17th and loved it. On the 24th, Robert. who serves in the army here, worked a 24 hour shift from Saturday to Sunday and left work at 10AM. He went home to change clothes and showed up to church for sacrament meeting and brought his older brother as well. We have very high hopes for them and have set dates for baptism as well with the two younger brothers. We have many other couples that we are teaching. I would really love to help them get baptized and begin working towards a sealing in the temple to be able to attend in a year before my mission ends. Certainly not all the people we meet accept the feelings they receive from our visits. One man named Roberto said he feels so light and peaceful when we teach and especially when we introduced the Book of Mormon and taught about the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but that right now he is too ``prideful to give the attention necessary to learn more´´. We have high hopes for him, as now he knows how to pray and has a Book of Mormon to help with the challenges he enfronts.
I enjoy the chance we have every day to study personally and receive revelation while learning more about the doctrine of Christ. I studied more about covenants this week which made my mind reflect more on the word responsibility. I forgot to bring my notes with me, but I really love feeling the Holy Ghost teach me during our personal study time. Rather than give it the name personal study time, I have switched to personal revelation time. I try to treat the minutes in a consecrated manner, worthy of the companionship of the Holy Ghost and I do feel the guidance from Him.
We started an English class here and it appears that the number of participants will increase quickly. It has been sometime since the missionaries had a class and we took a picture of our fancy sign. By the quality of the sign, we probably didn´t need to write ``de graça´´ - for free.
With love and charity
Elder Graziano

No comments:

Post a Comment