Crazy week!

The weather is starting to cool down; it's SO nice. We can finally stand outside for five minutes without having shiny faces from the humidity!

This Sunday we FINALLY got one of our less active members, Michael, to come to church. We have been meeting with him twice a week or so, and he knows so much about the church and still has a testimony of it, but was scared to come back because he was judged really harshly by his peers for some mistakes he made as a teenager. He feels like the black sheep of the group he grew up with. But we saw him a few days ago and finally decided to be bold and tell him that nothing would ever change if he didn't man up and show up on Sunday. So he did. And of course, he was welcomed back with open arms by his old friends. He had a really great experience and met with the bishop who told us that he wants to consider going on a mission. We are hoping he will be just like Brother Weeks, who has been to church 5 weeks in a row now. He just needed to gain his momentum back.

Some less fun news though, I have been feeling pretty sick this last week. I finally went to the doctor on Friday and they said I just have really low blood sugar, so to eat a lot of protein. Hopefully that works.

Since Sister Huskey is getting ready to go to Brazil (hopefully soon), we have been studying Portugese for a half hour a day. I have the First Vision and part of D&C 4 memorized in Portugese. Hopefully we will be able to use it when we meet Spanish speaking people here. Apparently it's pretty similar.

One of the little boys in our ward is getting baptized on Saturday but he just barely turned 9, so it's technically a "convert baptism". So technically speaking, I'll be having my first baptism this week! Haha. We get to set up the whole thing, and make programs, and everything, so it's exciting. I'm going to play the piano for it.

One of our ward members owns a restaurant and we eat there sometimes for free. They started this tradition of picking a topic and having us write a little thought about that topic that they'll post up on the wall of their restaurant. This week's topic was "discernment" and they included the scripture 1 Samuel 16:7 "But the Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart."

I've been thinking about that scripture a lot this week because as missionaries, we are literal representatives of Jesus Christ so we are responsible for looking past surface level traits and seeing our investigators' hearts. It's hard because we teach so many people that do things we know are not right, or even just see people that look scary or mean but that we know we need to go talk to. I don't remember who said it, but someone told us to picture every person we teach in all white, going to the temple. Part of becoming more Christlike means seeing people as they have the potential to become, not just how they are right now, and I know that as we try to do that we will be blessed with the ability to reach out to people in ways we wouldn't be able to otherwise.


Love,