February 11, 2013

 Filling up the Branch "baptismal pool"  -  by buckets and a small hose ...

 Baptism of Stephanie!

 another one ...

Cliff and I ...   ha.

Times flies when your a missionary. And I can hardly believe that its already been a week. Its weird that my time is running out as a missionary. Lets do this! As for couple missionaries in our mission, I don't even know...  There was a couple at the beginning of my mission, but I haven't seen any since then. I've seen some that serve "here," but I don't know if they are part of our mission. This past week was a pretty good week as we had the Baptism of Stefanie. She came to the Branch one week, after several months of being invited by Elder Wolfe while he was on a division. Then she travelled, and now everything calmed back down, and she was finally able to be baptised. It was the first baptism at our Branch building. All the rest have been at the Chapel in another area. It was in a type of pool that we set up, and we filled it up with a slow going hose, and a lot of Buckets. That was pretty cool. It also was leaking the whole time as well, so we had to fill it up enough so it wouldn't lower to much. The leak wasn't too much though ...  In the end, she was Baptised and all went well, so that was way cool. We also have another Baptism planned for this week that is the daughter of a member that was inactive for some time. She came back when she moved here, and asked us to teach her daughter. Sara is her Daughter and is about 10 years old. We also are working with several Rapazes (Young men, + or -) about our age. One of them is ready to be baptised, and just needs to go to church. His name is Henrique, and he is pretty cool. The other is Aloisio, and we found him the other day when a drunk called us over and talked to us. Then he called Aloisio over to pray with us, and we went to his house and taught him. He seems like a cool guy. We hope that he also progresses to be baptised. We haven't seen Bruno since the day he was confirmed, but we are planning to go there tonight. I am doing great here, and am loving the mission. I also wanted to send home a scripture that is in Ether 12:6. It is indeed a scripture mastery, but I hope that we always decide to take the step of Faith in our lives. The Lord loves all of us, and wants us all to be happy, but happiness doesn't come on a silver platter. True happiness comes through our work and devotion to eternal things and keeping the commandments of God. That involves us taking our first steps of faith, and getting up every time that we fall. We will never really understand the ways of God in this life, but what we can understand is that He is our Loving Father in Heaven, and will bless us according to our faith. I hope that we all can focus on our faith, do God's will. Blessings appear to come to those that do wrong things, but the so called "blessing" is but a small moment that will be drown out by the great misery that comes from sin. The Righteous will always be blessed, and the Lord blesses us so that all things are possible through our faith. I love you all, and hope that you all can have a great week this week.

Abraço,

Elder Tanner Ross Paxman