February 24, 2014 - Brazil Goiania Mission - Uberlandia - Week 56

Dear Family,

So this week started off really well, and then ended on a sad note. We were having a bunch of success during the start of the week. We were finding a ton of new people to teach and we marked a baptismal date with a lady on Thursday. Then, in her baptismal interview, she all of the sudden changed her mind. It made me so sad :(. We marked two more dates with two women, but the dates fell because they didn´t come to church and we honestly haven´t been able to come in contact with them since like Friday. We´re not sure what happened because they were so interested! We also only had another lady at church on Sunday, but she just can´t give up smoking, and so she can´t be baptized. It´s sort of frustrating. 

I am just trying to be patient. I´m not perfect, and I get jealous of other Elders´ success sometimes. I remember reading Cooper´s blog like about 5 months ago and I remember him saying that he was working his butt off and not seeing the results, but now he is just baptizing like crazy. And then I read uncle Dave´s email this week and it really helped me! He talked about being patient and how basically the same thing was happening when he was on his mission. I just need to be patient. Haha I thought that I was the most patient person on the face of the earth before my mission, but I guess I still need to learn how to be even more patient. It´ll all work out. I promised myself that I wouldn´t ever want to get transferred out of an area, and so I´m determined to have it stay that way.

I swear, like doing service projects is like frowned upon here haha. I think we should do a lot more service. We had a few members ask us to help out with some service, and the other elders in Aurora like complained about it so hard. They had absolutely no desire to help out. It was the first time that I helped out here in Brazil since I´ve been in Montana. In Montana, that is All we did, was service. But now, we never do it.

What advice can you guys give me? I´m trying everything I can possibly think of. I hope everything works out.

Love you guys! Thank you for all the support.


Elder Hanson