Milagres! 9 de Março 2015

A miracle happened this week!

     During the first weeks of our first transfer in Teófilo Otoni, we had felt prompted to search out a less active member named Claudia that Elder Barroso had baptized his first time here in 2013. We passed  by her house several times and at different hours of the day, but we never managed to catch her at home. Months passed by, and we had forgotten about Claudia. We didn´t even know if she still lived here. Then last week, as we were headed home after the church meetings, Elder Barroso saw a woman walking on the street, and he said to me, ``She looks like Claudia!´´

     The woman saw us, and crossed to the other side of the street. I found that a little strange. She then stopped and pulled out her phone and started texting someone. As we passed on the other side of the street, Elder Barroso stopped and shouted, ``Claudia???´´ She looked up, startled. Seeing that it was us, she said, ``hey...´´. Yup, it was Claudia! We went over to talk to her, and she told us about some difficulties that she passed through after Elder Barroso and his companion were transferred, which resulted in her inactivity after only a few short weeks. She also told us that she had read the Book of Mormon that same morning after having not read for a long time, and had prayed for help. She received her answer when we found her later that day! We have been working with her this week, taking her to visit other members and to activities at the church. She made it to church yesterday, and with the help of some new member friends, she has recommited to fully living the gospel!

     Another miracle this week: After the baptism of Julio Cesar last Sunday, I expressed to my companion, Elder Barroso, that I wanted to baptize just one more time before I went home, but the possibility of finding someone to prepare and baptize so quickly was pretty low. We decided to just keep working, and the Lord would do the rest. Thursday night, we received a call from the Sister missionaries here in Teófilo. They told us that they had planned the baptism of their investigator, Maycom, for Friday. When they asked him if he would like the branch president to perform his baptism, he said that he wanted me to baptize him! At first, I was really confused because I had never met Maycom, becasue the Sisters are from a different branch. How on earth did he know who I was??? They told me that Maycom was at Julio Cesar´s baptism last Sunday, and felt the spirit strongly when I performed the baptism. He wanted ``the same guy who baptized that one kid.´´ ha ha ha. They also asked me to sing (of course), and I agreed. It was one of the most beautiful baptismal services I´ve seen on my mission. It was such an honor to perform the baptism of Maycom!


I hope you all have a great week! Love you all and see you soon!


Elder Crapo

BAPTISMO!!!! 2 de MARÇO 2015

Hey! 

Yup, you guessed it, we had a baptism yesterday! WAHOO!!!! Julio Cesar has been doing really well this week! We went and bought a remote for their DVD player (the joys of the Brazilian market...you can find anything!) so that they could watch some of the church´s films in Portuguese. We watched The Restoration, Finding Faith In Christ, and The Lamb of God. It´s been a great way to help Julio understand about the Atonement and the Restoration, and he loves it! We heard that he drives his mom crazy watching them over and over again, and he really understands!! On Saturday, he explained to us how Christ was baptized (complete with actions, crossing his hands and falling onto the couch.) He´s also been really great in Primary. He always volunteers to say the prayer, and he prays really well!!! On Sunday, he was so excited to be baptized, and we had A LOT of support from the branch. It was good to fill the room with people to watch. The baptism happened without complications and Julio Cesar went in and out of the font with a grin from ear to ear. Other than that, we´ve been trying to find a good teaching group. We´re getting creative and looking in places we´ve never been, talking more about family history (a challenge from President Young), and following the spirit. We also received some referrals yesterday who seem to have a lot of potential, so well be rooting for things to go well! I hope you all are well and happy.

 I love you, and see you soon!

 Elder Crapo  

Baptism!

More Baptism!!

We decided to run to the chapel (on the other side of the city) on p-day...

...and it rained.

The District!

P-day lunch! (it´s our free day...we eat what we want, and suffer the rest of the week as we exercise.)

More flowers...because we´re creative like that.

Yeah, sorry!

We had lunch with a member family...and their parrots.

23 de Fevereiro 2015

Ei, Galeira! So, I really don´t have too much to say today since I feel like I JUST sent an e-mail home. Here´s a quick update: Julio Cesar is really progressing well! One day, as we were passing by their house on the way to another appointment, we heared Julio saying, ``The missionaries said that it´s not good to use Tobacco, alcohol, illegal drugs, tea, and coffee!´´ I think he was teaching his 5 year old sister about the Word of Wisdom, haha. It´s good to know that some things we teach are sticking! We found a family of four boys, all with the ages of priesthood holders! It´s getting a little repetitive, though, because we can only catch one brother at home at a time, so every day we have to teach the same thing to a different brother to catch him up with the others, haha. The other missionaries also passed us a great referral that they contacted on the street. His name is Alex! (I know, I can´t believe it either! A normal name!) He´s 17 years old and lives alone in a really nice condominium because his parents live in another city, and he´s here in Teófilo to study. He received us really well in our first visit, and accepted a baptismal date! He also made it to church with us yesterday, but while we were walking to the church with him, he told us that he would suddenly move back home for about a month to help out with a family crisis there. SO CLOSE!!!! That´s okay, though. When he gets back, the missionaries here will keep working with him and he´ll be baptized, which is what really matters. I´ll have to hunt him down on facebook when I get home. I hope you all are hanging in there! Have a good safe week, y´all! Love you and see you soon! (Like...really soon.) :) Elder Crapo

``That´s why we love Carnaval!´´... ``Só que não´´ (only, not...) 19 de Fevereiro 2015

SO...let me explain... Remember when I said that the city would completely shut down during Carnaval? That´s what happened on Monday when we were supposed to send our e-mails...and everything was still closed on Tuesday, and Wednesday we spent all day travelling to zone conference, having zone conference, and travelling back. It was like driving to Cedar City for a meeting and coming back the same day. We arrived pretty beat... But the conference was great. President Young is really focusing on how we´re using the Book of Mormon, and I remembered a lot of things I learned earlier in my mission that I need to do better. Also because of Carnaval, we really had a hard time finding anyone to teach. Actually, we were having a hard time finding anyone to look at. Really... I´ve never seen Brazil so quiet. We did find a 15 year old boy named Isaac who seemed a little shy, but receptive. His parents told us that he creates chores for himself to do around the house, and completes them without his parents telling him anything. THAT´S the kind of men we want in the church, haha. Isaac said that he´d like to make a visit to the church, and his parents said he could go if we went to pick him up (we would have gone to pick him up anyway, haha). Also, our recent convert, Juneia´s son is home from his trip to his grandma´s house, and has started to receive the discussions. It´s great because you can tell that Juneia has been taking time to teach him everything ahead of our visits, so he already knows all the answers to the questions we ask. It´s reallt funny when he starts showing some of the traditions from other churches and Juneia quickly and desperately corrects him, haha. For example, in our last visit, we let Julio say the closing prayer by himself. Everything went great until he got to the end, and started to say, ``in the name of the Father, and the Son, and th--´´ after which, Juneia was like: ``NO NO NO!!!`` hahaha. She then told him ``In the name of Jesus Christ...`` It was pretty funny. That´s all for this week! I love you all and see you soon! Elder Crapo

9 de Fevereiro 2015

BOM DIA!!!

     We´ve had a really great week! It´s been so great to be able to get back to working hard after being stuck at home feeling pain for so long! This week we found a really great family of 6! There are four girls, one boy and they live with their single Mom. Our lessons with them are really entertaining but also spiritual. The little 8 year-old, Leticia, is a little fire ball and asks lots of questions, haha. The last lesson, as we were teaching about the Holy Ghost, I gave the example of the comforter and told them that where I live, it gets really cold and snows. That led to all sorts of questions, and the girls started singing ``Do you want to build a snowmaaaaan???´´ haha. Yes, Frozen is a world-wide epidemic. They really like the lessons, though. The mom, too. They didn´t make it to church yesterday, but we´ll get all six of them there next time.


     We finally got rain!!! We started getting some promising clouds on Wednesday, and we got rain from Thursday until Sunday. We´ve really been needing it. We´re grateful for the moisture, but the mud makes it a little hard to climb some of the hills. Sometimes it seems like we´re just walking on a treadmilll as we try to climb. We laughed pretty hard when I decided to try harder and almost fell on my face after running in place for a good minute.


     We´re gearing up for Carnaval, which will start on the 17th, I think. It seems like the partying here in the city will be minimal, which is good, but that also means that everyone will go elsewhere to celebrate. We´ll start teaching cats and dogs if things get too deserted. They listen pretty well for the most part. The hardest part will be getting the cats to enter the baptismal font. Not sure what we´ll do about that...


      I hope you all are well! Love you so much! Have a great week, and see you soon!


Elder Crapo

The promised pictures!

Monday: Pointing to the mission on our map! We were searching for creativity, as it was the first day... yeah, sorry.

Tuesday: Still searching for creativity. We found these pretty flowers!

Wednesday: The closest thing we got to a rain cloud for over a month!

Thursday: It finally rained! You can see by our nervous smiles that we were about to get pounded by that rain cloud...which we were.

Friday: Found this coke bottle with Livie´s name on it!

Saturday: What happens when the members leave the room during lunch...

Sunday: More Rain!!! Love you so much! More to come next week!

No Pain No Gain!!! 26 de Janeiro 2015

What a week!



     Our district is full of troopers!!! I´ve never seen a group of missionaries so afflicted yet so determined and successful! Our district leader has a really painful ingrown toenail, his companion is suffering from an inflamed knee, Elder Dos Santos still suffers from shoulder pains, my companion, Elder Barroso´s back problems continue to worsen (the two keep me busy as I give massages that I learned from Julie each night before we sleep), and although my ankle is perfectly fine, I had a fun night on Friday fighting some pretty intense jaw pain that could be caused by an ear infection. I slept a total of about 3 hours trading hot rags to help with the pain. No pain killer we had in the house was doing the job. We called Sister Young the next morning, and waited for three hours at a ``ready help´´ center (which was on strike) becasue no other hospital in the city accepts our health plan. In the end, we just went to the pharmacy and asked for help there, because nobody was going to help us. After receiving some medicine at about noon the next day, I finally managed to get some sleep. Elder Barroso said that he had to make quite a bit of a rukus to wake me up to eat lunch, hahaha. Even shaking me like a crazy person wasn´t pulling me out of my trance. He thought I had died. :)


     All that being said, I have an announcement:



WE HAD A BAPTISM!!!!


     Our investigator, Juneia, has been reading and praying every day since our first visit, and said that she was excited to go to church again, that she traded her coffee for juice in the morning, and that she received an answer and knows the church is true. The only thing holding her back was the Law of Chastity, which we thought she broke with her boyfriend during the weekends. We discovered on Thursday that they don´t do any of that at all!!! SURPRISE! That same visit, we invited her to be baptized on Sunday, and she accepted. In the following visits, she told us that she wasn´t going to let anything stop her from getting baptized!!! It was incredible to see her so confident, because in the first visit, she seemed pretty squishy about everything. The Gospel changes people!


     We also had a great work week and found several people with much potential!  The district has baptized at least one person each week this transfer, even thought we´re all dying! he he. We´re looking forward to this last week of the transfer. It´s been really spiritual to see everyone helping each other in some way. Even though we´re suffering, we´re not suffering alone. :) But really, this is getting good! I love you all, and see you soon!


Elder Crapo

We want some more! We want some more! 19 de Janeiro 2015

We have some good news and some bad news this week.

     We´ve had an interesting week. We woke up in the middle of the night on Tuesday to travel the 3 hours to Nanuque for our zone meeting, then travel back again after. Wednesday, we helped out at a service project for some inactive members where your´s truly ever so gracefully sprained his ankle. That kept us in house arrest for the rest of the day, and the work went...slowly until I fully recovered yesterday. However, one of the inactives came back to church yesterday, so it was all worth it!

      Later in the week, as we were walking to an appointment, we passed by a man sitting on the street curb who appeared to be pretty worn out and tired. As we passed, he asked us, ``Where can I find a church here?´´ We decided to take advantage of the situation and jump right into teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He told us that he´ll be here in the city for about 6 months working on a home reformation, and that was why he was so tired. He humbly stated that the work was hard, and that he was far from his wife and son (he´s legally married!!!). He invited us to see the house he was working on, and it was easy to see that there was much to be done. He accepted both an invitation to church and for baptism, and thanked us for stopping by.

     That seems to be the most of the news for this week. We´re hoping for a more eventful, and less painful work week. :) Love you all and see you soon!

Elder Crapo