Week 58 Emergency Transfers

This week was a little hectic and a lot of things changed over here on
the island.  Elder McGraw was sent home because of some stuff from
before the mission that he needed to take care of before continued
service.  He is 21 and had a full 6 months on the mission.  Now i am
serving with a brand new elder named Elder Pickrell.  He is from
Casper, Wyoming and is kind of a goober that does not speak any
Portuguese at all, so it is back to the training schedule for me and I
will be repeating myself a lot now in Portuguese and be teaching all
of the basics again. I am really starting from ground 0 with him
because he did not have a good situation for the first couple weeks in
the mission and he really does struggle with the language.  But he
does have a desire to work and he seems prepared enough to accept my
help so that he can start progressing.

It really was not fun for me to have to see Elder McGraw go.  We had
become really good friends and he is a really great guy. It is too bad
that he decided to take this road but at this point it is definitely
what is best for him.  sure is rough on the missionaries and all the
members and investigators here though.. It really goes to show how
important that it is to really make sure that you are ready to be out
here and to really be honest always with your priesthood leaders. It
is a hard way to learn the lesson, but hopefully he will be able to
stay strong and maybe even return to the mission.  continued prayers
for him would be appreciated.

A missionary in our district from Burley Idaho named Elder Greener,
who has become a good friend also lost a grandparent this week so it
was a pretty rough week for the missionaries here on the island.

As for Maria and Manuel hoping that what happened last week still
might not be too good to be true..  We went over there for a visit
with a member named Marco Amaral ( a member of two years that received
the Melchizedek priesthood about 2 months ago, he also is an openly
confessed recovered heroin addict and even a facilitator in the
addiction recovery group here in the island) who the sisters
especially work with all of the time and right when she answered the
door full on war broke out.  Apparently in the old lady bingo circles
or something Maria has come to believe that Marco is still using
heroin.  She claims that his mother told her that and she was quite
convinced even until Marco just showed himself to the door and even
afterwards she just couldn't leave it behind her.

so i went ahead and decided to look into it, I interviewed Marco
(which I was needing to do anyways as the 1st con.) and even got to
talk to his mother and I believe that they are telling the truth and
that he has changed.  Maria is really stuck on the subject and saying
that she will never return to the Church and she has stopped reading
and everything also Manuel will be heading out to Lisbon.  But last
night i laid it down for them after reading mosiah 4: 6-12 with them
telling them that they have to do this if they want to  receive
salvation and I testified a lot that it is true and I tried to
remember them about the spiritual confirmations that they have had
which worked well and we left them with a strong spiritual experience.
Anyways for now I am going to give them a couple of days to cool off
and then we will go back and see if we can get her to start back up
with the book of Mormon.   so that was the unfortunate drama this
week.

We had a family from California of 7 show up in church today with
their curly blonde hair and everything (they were here to do some
family history work since they have ancestors from here).  i
translated the last two hours for the 12 year old named Caleb.  It was
a cool experience to see that you can be nourished spiritually no
matter what in the church and that it is the same in the whole world.

love yall!