Enjoy his letter!
Hey!
It was so good to get your guys' letters this week. Happy anniversary!! It sounds like you guys had fun this weekend which is awesome. Happy for you guys for sure. Missing you guys. My birthday was the worst because nothing happened, just kidding, it was awesome, members called to wish me happy birthday and at night, one of the recent converts in our ward (Vaynna) and her family threw an awesome party for me. They sang in english and decorated with zelda stuff and there was cake, and it was super awesome haha. I got a little trunky but I was ok, I felt really loved by everyone and it was just super nice. I was definitely well taken care of, and I felt like I was at home. It was cool.
My new companion is great. He's a little tired but wants to keep working till the end. He's trying to avoid counting the days he has left, so just to bug him, I've been counting hahaha. I miss Elder Britos but I really like Elder Andrade, so it's all good. His dad's gonna come pick him up on the day I'll turn 1 year old on the mission. Yesterday was 11 months!! Today I officially have 1 year left before I go home. Crazy right? Trying not to think too much about that haha. My mission will be almost exactly 23 months. Yesterday I was sitting in church and started to kinda think back on my mission, because I've been nearing the halfway mark and so on. I still feel so far away from where I ideally want to be as a missionary but I had the idea to make a list of all the blessings that have come from my mission up until now, here is the incomplete version (I left it at home):
-a love of Brazil, including the country, culture, weather, food, people, language, music and nature
-learned portuguese
-met tons of new people and made so many friendships
-passed succesfully through hard trials and became stronger and better
-became more confident talking to people, have a strong desire to be more social and interact with people (uh, that's a miracle)
-increased physical capacity (more or less)
-increased teaching abilities and knowledge
There's more that I thought of the other day but I don't remember it all. The point is that struck me is that even though my mission hasn't necessarily been everything I wanted it to be up until this point, I've been really really blessed, more than I could have imagined before. I thought that was really neat.
As far as investigators go, we're looking for more, but we had a neat experience this week. My companion went and talked to a family that passed us on the street, and the mom said we could visit their house this week. A few days ago we went there and she wasn't home, so we went and visited someone else. On the way back to check again, we saw her on the street, and went with her family to her house. We taught her the restoration and at the end when we invited her to pray in her room in the moment, she came back crying and we invited her to be baptized on the 26th. She accepted! I don't know if that's gonna go through honestly, the family has a lot of challenges, but it was a really cool experience.
That was pretty much my week. Love you guys!!!
Elder Sederholm
