MIRACLES!!!

Oi família e amigos!! 

Tudo Bem?! 

Well, this week was crazy. 

We started off with an integration night with the ward on Thursday---pie in the face. There was a trivia question about the scriptures, history, etc, or a complete the music that we had made up. Two people went head to head to answer. Whoever answered right got to throw a beaten egg white and sugar "pie" in the other´s face. It was pretty hilarious. And really messy. But super fun. 

      

Friday during district meeting I received a letter from Sister Ogle and almost cried for joy. A member in the Elder´s ward had been visiting the Fazenda and Sister Ogle sent a little letter with him. That seriously was a little miracle for me :)

Friday, we had a lesson with Maristela. It was super good. We taught about Baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost. The Spirit was so strong! We invited her to be baptized on August 27. SHE ACCEPTED!!!! We were so happy and she was super excited!!! Well, Saturday night rolled around and we passed by her house to tell her information about who would be picking her up for church. SHE READ THE BOOK OF MORMON!!! She hadn´t ever read any part of it on her own until this point!!! And she was still SUPER excited about church. Well I prayed all night long and all Sunday morning that she would make it to church, because something always happens so that she can't go. Well, we were leaving to catch the bus and hadn´t heard anything from her yet, which meant that things were still good. And at 8:15 (15 minutes before they had arranged to meet to carpool to church) we got a text from Maristela. That she wasn´t going to be able to come to church because her son had been sick and hadn´t slept, that she had given up on being baptized because every time she tried something bad happened, and that she didn´t want us to visit her any more. My heart broke. I was almost in tears. I wanted to run to her house and tell her that she could do it, that it was going to be hard, but she could do it, but we got on the bus and went to church. Well, we had marked to visit with her at 7 o'clock sunday. And so we went, and we took Irmã Marcia and Ana with us. And they helped us help Maristela understand that there will always be opposition against that which is good, and that she couldn´t give up! She´s back on track for baptism and we are stoked!!! 

I know that Heavenly Father hears and answers prayers. I prayed like crazy for Maristela. And not everything I prayed for happened how I hoped it would, but Heavenly Father answered my prayers in His own time. I know that He is our loving Father and that He is always taking care of us! 

I love you all and hope you are well! 

Have a wonderful week! 

Sister Wilkins

Lunch I made this week

Before lunch yesterday

selfie this morning because of lots of rain.....

Just Another Week in the field bearing testimony

Oi familia e amigos! 

This week we were able to find Maristela again! 

She said that no one said anything to her and she still wants to come to church and get baptized! We read a little of the Book of Mormon with her and it was really good, but we weren´t able to go back there, she cancelled. Not totally sure why. 

Other than that nearly everything fell through this week. No one came to church again, and Maristela was the only investigator we got a lesson with, and a couple of new investigators. 

We were able to rescue two copies of the Book of Mormon this week, so that was awesome! Really it was a blessing, because we weren't able to get them back for a while and the people were really understanding as to why we needed them back. 

We were knocking doors and a man answered and began to tell us how wrong we are and how we are being deceived. That was super sad. The man told us that he ripped up and burned a Book of Mormon and that it was all phony. It was super sad. But I was able to stand and bear testimony that I knew that the Book of Mormon was true, independent of if he knew it or not. I knew it and I knew that God had answered my prayer, just as He will answer the prayer of any of his children who will ask with a "sincere heart and with real intent having faith" that they will receive an answer, and they will receive! That is a promise from a prophet of God. If you don´t know if the Book of Mormon is true, go home, read it, specifically read Moroni 10:3-5 and get on your knees and ask God. He will answer you and you will know! 

I am so grateful for the Book of mormon and for the answers to many of life´s questions that are found in that sacred book. Never deny the power of the Book of Mormon. 

Sorry it´s short this week, really not much is happening. 

Although, we did find out that we have 12+ investigators who have all accepted the baptismal invitation. The problem is having lessons with them and getting them to church so that we can mark baptismal dates. Please pray for them! (Pray that they will keep their commitments!  Prayers work!)

A Pretty Morning

Love you all! 

Have a great week! 

Sister Wilkins

Just another week

Oi família e amigos! 

Well this week started off pretty exciting. I was going to get in the shower one night when I saw some huge insect crawling in the other Sisters´ room. It was a cockroach, literally 3 or 4 inches long. It was disgusting. We spent the next 40+ minutes, jumping from chair to chair with brooms in hand, trying to kill it. Turns out that the thing was pretty good at hide and seek. But we killed it. Some of it´s kids are still lurking around the house though. So that´s fun! haha

cool fountain in the middle of the city

Well, we had zone training this week and that was cool. There are four Americans in the zone. That´s pretty weird for me. Elder Naylor is in my zone, so I got to sit and talk to him for a while. And then there´s Elder Peterson and Elder Norman. We learned about teaching with the Spirit and being the instruments of the Spirit. That was pretty cool.

The sisters at zone training

Me and sister E Costa

Well, we have an investigator who flat out told us in my first visit with her that she doesn´t want to be baptized. But she reads the Book of Mormon and she likes that it explains things that she doesn´t understand from the Bible. I don´t understand!! It was pretty weird. We are trying to discover how we can help her. 

Also, we found a 16 year old girl this week, thinking that we were going to find another person we were looking for. She let us in for a message and she is super awesome! She wants to know all about the plan of salvation, but she didn´t know that´s what she needed! We started talking about God because she didn´t understand why bad things could happen to people and why God would let that happen. We got to talk with her about choices and consequences and responsibility. It was pretty cool. She seems really interested and we are really excited about it all. 

Well this week, we went looking for a lot of new people to teach, and we found about 10, and it was pretty incredible to me that several of them talked about how they had been praying or fasting that day that God would send them a light. We got to be that light. I know that Heavenly Father answers our prayers and I am so grateful for the opportunity that I get to answer the prayers of those searching for the truth. It really is a life-changing experience.

View from our little balcony

hope you are all doing well! 

Love you all! 

Would love to hear from you all! 

Sister Wilkins

In Chapeco

Well oi família e amigos. 

I arrived in Chapecó at 6:15 tuesday morning and it was FREEZING!!! It is a lot colder here than any other area I have been in. I traveled alone, but it was totally uneventful. 

Saying goodbye at the bus station

Famous Florianopolis bridge from the bus

Chapecó is huge and has a TON of hills. Which is exactly the opposite of what people told me. The weather here is super wacky. It´s so cold and foggy in the morning that you can barely see anything and then after lunch we are sweating like crazy because it is so hot. And then 5 o´clock comes around and it already starts getting cold again. 

Me and Sister Costa

Well, I have a new comp, Sister E. Costa. She is from Manaus! She says it´s a city there...not just boats and rivers and forests like I thought....she is really excited about the work, so that´s awesome. And she loves to do contacts, which is great! 

Well, here there are a lot of orange trees. I swear there are orange trees in everyone´s backyard. So we drink fresh orange juice at a lot of the lunches and members and investigators send us home with cuties! (aka clementines!) It is super awesome! 

Here, the church is in the Elder´s area. There is a reallly big main road that splits our area with theirs, We have one side, and we can´t cross the road or it is their side. But the church is in their area and we have to take a bus and then walk 20 minutes to get there. 

They have started a "open house" with the wards here. Every Thursday us sisters and at least one of the three companionships of Elders in our district goes to the church and we wait outside and invite everyone who passes by to come inside for a tour of the church. And we invite them to church on Sunday! It is pretty cool. A different idea. Just started last transfer, so they haven´t seen too many results yet, but we are hoping that it helps. 

Our district is 10 people again. 2 new elders from the CTM. And two other American elders. It´s pretty chill. 

Our District in Chapeco

Well, we have a couple investigators here with some good potential, but I want to tell you about just one of them. 

Her name is Maristela. She has a 2 year old boy who is extremely intelligent and sometimes makes it difficult to have a lesson. And she visited the church once 7 years ago with a member. Well, the other sisters found her and started teaching her. This week in the first visit we taught her about prophets and it went really well. At the end of the visit she started asking about baptism! It was awesome. The second visit we taught the rest of the Restoration of the Gospel to her, and left a Book of Mormon. We invited her to be baptized and she said yes!!! :) We still have to set a date, and she still has to come to church because for some reason or another she didn´t come yesterday. But she is really excited about it all! Please pray for her and that she will make it to church. Something always happens that makes it so she can´t go. 

Well, hope you are all doing good! 

I love you! 

Sister Wilkins

TRANSFERS AND 1 YEAR!

Oi família e amigos!!! 

Well, I have got a feeling that I probably will not be able to include everything that I want to in this email because this week was slightly crazy. But...I will do my best. 

Well, first of all we got transfer calls this week. I am being transferred...to Chapecó. Which is literally on the other side of the mission. so I will be getting on a bus tonight and riding for 11-12 hours to get there! wahoo! haha. I will have a Brazilian companion who just got here last transfer. It should be pretty fun! 

Well, we were doing contacts on the street one day here...well, like every other day. But this day was different. WE got close to giving up because it was getting cold and dark and no one was on the street. So, we decided to walk one more street...and what happened?! TWO police officers stopped us asking if we were American. I stopped and said yes, asked them where they were from...and there began the conversation. One of them knew a little about the church and started asking about the Book of Mormon...so what did we do? We had a lesson on the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith´s vision right there on the street with two policemen whose boss kept telling them they needed to leave, but they kept talking. It was AWESOME! 

I don´t know if you guys remember the couple that I told you about last week? The returned missionary and her husband? Well, we got to teach them a couple times this week and they are AMAZING!!! Bruno doesn´t have a lot of religious background, but Naira has taught him a little and he already recognizes the Spirit in his home when we talk about the gospel!!! IT is wonderful!!! He really gets it, and I love watching him and seeing how happy he is learning and talking about it! Families like this one really make missionary work worth it.

I celebrated one year on the mission this week! 

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Cut up shirt for one year!

We celebrated by going to Floripa to pick up my bus ticket for transfers and then ordering a wonderful Brazilian pizza. Best in the world. 

It was pretty great. Thank you all for all your support and helping me get to this point.

Well, 7 and a half months with my little trainee...have to say that these months have not been easy. Sister Ogle and I have been through a lot together. We have struggled, had crazy roommates, and worked like crazy. We´ve cried together and laughed together and seen people change their lives over and over again. We have met some of the most wonderful people and we have had numerous doors slammed in our faces and hung up on over the phone. We have been through a lot together and I love her more than I can explain. She has shown me how to be a better missionary. She has taught me how to more fully love other people and to serve. She has shown me more of what it means to be a Christlike example and to really help these people that we are teaching...Sister Ogle probably won´t read this...but if she gets the chance, I hope that you know that I LOVE YOU! :) 

Well, I love you all. Thank you again for all your love and support. Let me know what I can do to help you! 

Matthew 26 and Hebrews 13:5-6

This was the majority of my study this week. It was pretty great. Maybe you´d like it too. 

Love you! 

Sister Wilkins

WE MOVED!!!

Oi familia e amigos! 

well, as you can tell from the title, this week we moved apartments. That was the majority of our week. It was some pretty crazy stuff. We got everything in our apartment packed in about 4 hours. That was a miracle. And the next morning all the furniture was taken apart, everything loaded into the moving truck and everything moved and put back together in about 5 hours. It was some pretty crazy stuff. The guys that moved us were carrying like four boxes on their backs up 3 flights of stairs, a washing machine on their head...it was crazy stuff. 

Well, this week has been rough still. Work is still hard but we are doing what we can to get it going here. 

We had a fireside with President in our ward yesterday and he talked about scripture study and missionary work...and marriage...that was pretty random. But it was super good. I think that the ward is going to help us a bunch! 

Subway in the new apartment

Yesterday at church we had a less active returned missionary show up at church with her husband and ask us to come and start teaching him so he can be baptized. JAW DROP. That was a miracle if I ever knew one. No one that we invited or that said they would come to church was actually there. But things are going. 

This week we get transfer calls. We know that something is going to happen, but not sure what. Let you know next week. 

Hope you are all doing well. Sorry this is kinda short. Not much happened. I love you! 

My district

Sister Wilkins

Happy Fourth of July

Oi família e amigos! 

This week has been pretty rough. No one we are teaching is progressing, and everyone else wants nothing to do with the church. It´s been a week of rejection. Sometimes missionary work is really frustrating. 

But this week we had zone conference with President. 

It was super good. The APs talked about weekly planning and how to conduct an effective weekly planning. And then they talked about how the standards of excellency are possible and what we have to reach those goals. 

We have been having trouble getting people to come to church in our area and I guess we are the only ones who are consistently having this problem with the São José and Floripa zones. So everyone was giving us suggestions on how to get people there. A majority we had already tried, but it was interesting. It was cool to get some advice. 

President talked about "Saltar do Barco" (I am not sure what the English translation for saltar is...I think it is get off or leave, something like that...leave the boat). He talked about getting out of the comfort zone and doing better. It was based off a talk/fireside from Elder Bednar. It was pretty good. 

Then he showed us the "Atonement and Missionary Work" video with parts of Elder Holland and President Eyring´s talks. It was super good. Of course all us sisters were practically in tears if they weren´t rolling down our cheeks already. But it was super good. It was in that moment watching that video  that something really struck me about the Atonement. I´ve been trying to get better about how tired I am on the mission...leave the sleepiness at home and just go out and work. And then it hit me. The following was my thought process: "Did Christ get tired during the Atonement? Probably. But did He stop? Did He give up on us? NO (add Elder Holland´s voice in on that last no) Thus, we as missionaries, we as members of the church cannot give up on the children of God. He never gave up on us. We are standing shoulder to shoulder with Him in this work." 

It is possible! We cannot accept to tire out in this work because it is His. He didn´t tire out doing His work for us, we can´t doing His. 

I don´t have time to type the courage study from two weeks ago that I wanted to share with you , but I will take pics and send them. 

I love you all! 

Have a good week! 

Sister Wilkins