Emails... and weed pullin'

   

 I would have liked this past week to have been more productive...., but we had a meeting in Vitória with all the Zone Leaders, so I had the fun opportunity to spend 18 hours on a bus in a span of my 40 hour "vacation" to Vitória. 

Daniel, his companion, and Sister Massagardi

     BUT. One experience that did happen that just proved to me the power of 1. Being bold, and 2. Service happened with this lady with the name of Tim (pronounced Chin for all of you trying to turn that name into a more female version.)

     We were returning to this one house that a member passed to us for a reference. The member said the daughter who lives there is super interested, but the mom there is super uninterested and goes to another church, and probably won´t let her daughter baptize in Christ´s Church (aka The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). So we walked past and the mom was outside sweeping the road (don´t worry, that´s a normal thing to do here) and working up a sweat. We asked for her daughter but she was out working. We then insisted to help her with her road sweepin´ and weed pullin´, but like all Brazilians, she persistently denied. I kept on asking but she kept saying no. BUT some divine intervention happened, and her music that was playing from inside the house stopped. She said, "One moment, I have to turn the music back on."

     When she took her first step inside the house, I robbed the broom, and my companion got on his knees and started pullin’ weeds. It took just a few seconds later until she was running outside of the house to stop us but I said, "TOO LATE. WE ARE ALREADY DOING IT."

     She laughed and let us continue our peaceful service filled demeanor. We chatted a bit and she opened up a lot more to us. Let us mark an appointment to return to her house to do a service project to pull A LOT more weeds and to share a message. 

      Moral of the story is she walked away with a better looking front lawn/driveway/road and we walked away with happy muddy hands and a lesson to teach this upcoming week!!!

Love you all! And if you need me, I´ll be pulling weeds! (@stevie g)

Elder Gardanier