Oiiii gente!! Tudo bem?? Wow well the transfer has come to an end already!! Holy cow!! Time flies!! Well, this week was SOOO good!! I just love the people here, the culture and the food of course haha!! But I hope y’all had a great week!!! To keep the momentum going let’s hop right into the week!!
Well, this week one of our friends Christian got baptized!!! So amazing!! He is a stud and his mom and dad are both members and it was just a matter of time till he was baptized!! But it was such a spiritual baptism!!! I loved it!! Lots of planning and running around getting stuff ready but ALWAYS worth it!! We also made pão de queijo with one of our friends and watched General Conference with her last week!! Her name is Theresa!! She loved it and wants to be baptized so we are working towards her baptism for the end of the month!! This past week we also played some soccer with one of our friends and had a great lesson with him and his girlfriend afterwards!! They’ve been to church several times as well and are super cool!! The Lord truly is truly moving his work forward here in this area!! Your prayers are so powerful and it would be so awesome if you guys could pray for these people to help them progress towards making and keeping covenants with our Heavenly Father!!!
Então, In preperation for the baptism we had to fill the font on top of a ton of other things. But as we were filling the font, we noticed the drain was a drain we’ve never seen before!! It was one that had a metal pole sitting in the drain that made noises that sounded like it was draining the font! So, we filled up the font and everything was good but the water was pretty cold so we had to drain it a little to put hot water in. But we thought that If you took the pole out it wouldn’t drain because it didn’t make any draining noises!! So, we leave and come back about 15 min later to check to see how much it filled up and sure enough it drained half of the water in the font!!! This was 15 min before the baptism so we had to put the metal pole BACK in without getting in the water haha so we had to be creative in getting the plug back in HAHAHA!! But the font ended up filling up on time and everything worked out smoothly and it was an incredible baptism!!
Well this week I was a little under the weather but I still worked my hardest!! And slept when I could HAHAHA but I’ve been listening to conference again and Elder Uchtdorf’s talk is the one I just finished!! And holy smokes I love his talk!! My favorite was the dialogue he created between us and Christ. If Christ was sitting right in front of you, what do you think that interaction would look like? Feel like? What would he say? What would you be thinking? The way Elder Uchtdorf describes the love that Christ has for us struck me differently this week!! The amount of love that Christ has for each one of us is perfect. Absolutely perfect!! He loves us too much to leave us where we are. And He has given us the opportunity to repent and to change!! Repentance truly is a joyful process!! Which I’ve learned doesn’t mean it won’t be hard!! But that’s where we find the joy in repenting, in truly changing our hearts. It’ll require work and a lot of getting up and trying and working harder. But Christ is with us every step of the way. I know this because I’ve felt it in my life!! Especially out here on a mission seeing people repent and truly come unto Christ. I’ve seen burdens be lifted as they yoked themselves to our Savior!!!
I love you all so much and I hope you have a great rest of this week!! Christ lives and He loves you!!
Até proxima!! Tchau tchau a gente!!
Elder Castillo