Leap Day

Hope that all is well on this 29th of Feb. 

I am well and healthy here in Brasil. This week had lots of neat experiences and we can see that God helps us in our work as missionaries. We are working with some guys to be baptized. We found a guy named Tiago. He is 19 and lives in very humble circumstances. He is awesome, and loves to talk to us. When we met him he was confused about all the churches and how all of them want money, because there is lots of robbery that happens in the other churches(here in brasil churches don’t pay taxes, and so lots of people just open their own church, it is crazy.!) We talked to him about the church of Jesus Christ and how we as missionaries help the people complete the repentance process. He liked that a lot. We were able to help him understand about the BoM. And how it will help him in his life. He like it and was able to read. Everything was right for him to come to church, Bruno passed at his house to get him, and he wasn’t there.. We were super bummed. We worked so hard, but sometimes things don’t work out like we planned. We need to hold fast, and work hard and everything will work out in the long run. 

This week was a week that you needed to have a good testimony of what you are doing is true. We received a lot of "No"s this week. In contacts that we do in the street, and in appointments that we set up. The neat thing about the mission is that it can take you beyond your own abilities. In these moments I don’t feel the least amount of anger, just I feel sad for the people that don’t understand what we are here to do. 

The best experience of this was yesterday. We had an appointment a long ways away from Lunch. We planned get there on time and had to walk faster than normal. Normally it would talk 25 min to get there and we got there in 12. We got there and it was an appointment that was scheduled. The woman looked at us, went inside to talk to her husband (who is an inactive member) and returned. She said "thanks but we don’t want to talk to you, my husband already knows what you are going to say, and because I am member of another church we don’t want to hear you." Well I couldn’t help but feel so sorry for the people that are confused by the clever temptations of satan. We left sweaty, and sad for them. But never desanimated we went to the next appointments, and we were able to have 2 awesome lessons where we bore strong testimony of how our work is the truth, how the church of Jesus Christ is true, and how our Savior atoned for us. It is incredible in our lowest moments how Jesus Christ can raise us up. 

I hope that you can study the scriptures. In my study these days I was doing the math about how much Christ used scriptures when he was here in the Americas. and 47.5% of the words he spoke were citations directly from the scriptures. WOW!!! and the best example of why we need to use the scriptures is in Chapter 23 of 3 Nephi. He teaches that we need to examine the scriptures. 

I love you guys so much❤  Elder Iverson