Monday,
January 26, 2015
Famlee!
Hey,
hey everyone! How are you all doing? How was your birthday, Levi? It sounded
awesome! You are sooo old! I think you might actually be older than me now!
This
week went well. Because we haven't had much success with all of the street and
door contacting we've been doing, or much success working with the members, we
have started a new plan to find people who are prepared for the gospel. We are
starting to visit people from the list of inactive members. It is a little bit daunting;
we have about 50 active members and a 40 page list of members with probably 10
or 15 on each page. The church in Portugal actually started in the Azores in
the air force base on Terceira. So the church has been out here 40 years or so.
Unfortunately over that time there have been a lot of ups and downs for the
branches. But that is just kind of how it is when the church is just getting
started.
We
made a visit to an inactive member Volodimir, who is not actually Portuguese as
you probably assumed, but Ukrainian. He has been here in Portugal 13 years. He
first came with his family seeking work, but when Portugal went down, all of
his family went back to Ukraine, but he stayed. He has done all sorts of work.
Whatever he can get. He started in civil construction, and his company took him
from the continent to the Azores, where the company failed because of the bad
economy. He sought work in another area, and found a job as a fisherman. It
sounded like the hardest job in the world to me. He would leave on a ship
working 18 hour days for sometimes as much as a month and then come back for a
week or two before going back out. Since, he has worked in all sorts of fishing
positions. He had been unemployed for some time, but has recently found work
gutting sharks. Crazy, huh? Well, he hadn't been to church for a long, long
time, but after visiting with him on Saturday he said he would come,
and in the end did arrive! He is a really humble, cool guy. I want to go
fishing with him before I leave.
This
is the last week of the transfer. Monday Elder Harris will leave and
I will get a new companion. It might just be the last companion of my mission.
Today however we are travelling to Lisbon (again...) for mission counsel. Which
means this week we will lose quite a bit of working time in our area. Hopefully
we still have time to make a lot more inactive member visits.
I
hope you all have a great week! Keep praying for me, I pray for all of you!
Love,
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