April 8

That´s not so good to hear grandpa isn´t doing so well. I´ll remember him in my prayers.

It was my last General Conference on the mission. It was kind of lame to be honest. During the first session, our building had problems with English, so all we got was some lame subtitles underneath. The second session was great, with English working perfectly. Then, on Sunday, we went to my old ward´s building to watch there because it was closer. They had English too, but no one else there was watching it in English, and I couldn´t stay alone, so I had to watch it in Português. Oh well, it was probably the first and last time I´ll have to watch a dubbed session of conference. I won´t lie, it was not so great. The translator is kind of slow, and doesn´t even try to capture the emotion of the speaker. 

We´re teaching this boy who knows the church is true. He says that he knows that the Book of Mormon is true and gets mildly irritated when his friends from other churches tell him he´s wrong. The only problem is that he was reading in 2 Nephi 31:14 that says: But, behold, my beloved brethren, thus came the voice of the Son unto me, saying: After ye have repented of your sins, and witnessed unto the Father that ye are willing to keep my commandments, by the baptism of water, and have received the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost, (...) and after this should deny me, it would have been better for you that ye had not known me. He´s worried that he´ll fall short afterward. We´ve done everything we can think of to help him; even several members have tried speaking with him, but he´s fixed on this idea.

This last Tuesday President Martins called all of the missionaries together for a special meeting. He showed us a a video of him on a show here in São Paulo where he was invited, with 3 other church leaders from other churches, to speak about a religious topic. It was about what the appearance of Christ should be like since he was born of Judaic decent. It was interesting, but since he knew he´d be on television in about 50,000 homes here in São Paulo, he made the best of it and taught several principles of the restored gospel and of the church. Basically mentioning eternal families, faith, repentance, baptism, the holy ghost, authority, and the Book of Mormon. In the end, he knocked on about 50,000 doors in about 40 minutes. Know we just need to find people who watched this program and help them learn more.

Well, I pretty much have only one transfer left. The next transfer starts on April 17th, but it´s only 5 weeks long, so a normal 6-week transfer starts this Wednesday.

Anyway, I hope everything works out up there between grandpa, mom being out of town, crunch week, and the rest of the kids. I´ll talk to you next week, and I´ll try and get a quick letter typed up now for UVU.

--
-Elder Candland