Great Week!

5-19-14

Family,

I hope you get feeling better mom and that you can resolve this health issue.

Dad - yeah teens can be a bit difficult sometimes but I know that on the outside you may seem a bit on the older side but on the inside you just a joyful happy youth. I believe that you got the special skills necessary to help them have a real appreciation for the prophet and other aspects of the church and thus have a real testimony and faith.

I'm happy to hear about the family and that everyone's havin fun.

The temple was way cool as always, it feels like so long ago that we went...but it was only a week. I remember that on the way there we got pulled over which was interesting! It slowed us down like 20 minutes and we ended up missing our session but we just went in a later session

This past week has been a good one, though a bit short as we lost a day to go to the temple. Something that's kind of funny is that my english is kinda messed up and I don't even know it half the time. Like sometimes we'll be talking in English and I'll just say "yeah let's go lunch. We'll lunch in our house" Or "Yeah we're going to the house of David" or "I'm feeling fault of nutella..." or "Jesus afasted himself from the disciples" stuff that totally doesn't make sense in english but it does to me because I speak portuguese!! Every time I say something like that, Elder Mikulecky is like "you wanna try that one again?" With a smile on his face and I think about what I just said and I'm just like "ah whatever, you know waht I meant" haha

Jose Carlos is awesome. He's still unemployed so he's awesomely free. Saturday there was a service project and he got there before us and left after us and was working almost the whole time. It was awesome. Every one knows him well too now as well which is awesome. Him and his mom went to church this last week and he went with a button up shirt and a tie which he found on the ground in another city haha. And Francisco went to church withOUT Delia which I thought was impressive, Delia wasn't feeling good (I wanted to say 'the Delia' because of portuguese) And Bruna went with Jussara her friend who loved church. It was her second time. And then after church we went to Bruna's house with her and Jussara and Rafael who also works at the Lan-house and I met her parents who are way cool and we talked for like 2 and a bit hours about the church and what not. It was way cool. We presented "The family: A proclamation.." and they loved it.

We're teaching Maria dos Anjos who is way cool. We're preparing her to be baptized this week. She's super awesome and went to church by herself this week! We were expecting 2 more awesome families to go to church but they both left to travel :/ One family is cool but it's having it's own family problems.. When we started talking with them, 2 daughters (Jessica and Juliana)were kind of rebellious and making snide comments and what not but the mom is a less active member and the dad is curious but kinda quiet. Anyways in the beginning it was kind of difficult. 2 of their kids have already been to church 3 times (Sidney and Julha) And so we were just trying to help the mom come back to church so that we can help the 2 younger ones to be baptized who've already been to church but we've percieved that the problem is worse than that. I won't go into details but it's kind of a messed up family but the good news is that they want to improve and the amazing thing is that the last time we visited them, there was a quite percievable difference in the mood in the house and of the family and when we were leaving, one of the rebellious daughters was like "so when will you guys come back?" Like she wanted us too. Sooo that's awesome but it totally was Not us. That was 100% the spirit while we were gone. He just kinda snuck in their hearts and softened them all up a bit. The great thing about teaching a family with some problems is that we really have a chance to help some children of God that are in need of some help to have less pain, less sorrow. So I'm happy to be able to be an instrument in the Lord's hands to help them.

THe other family is just awesome. We taught them the gospel of Christ and the spirit was very strong in their home and we left them and they already knew that everything we taught was true. Unfortunatley it wasn't the message of the restoration that they had this feeling about buttt it's a great foot in the door and they're really interested! We'll visit them again this thursday.

Not this past week but the one before, we were kind of prideful of what "we"  had achieved and then we go to church and there was like no one there and that was kinda like a smack in the face for us. This week we've tried to be more humble and recgonize more of the Lord's hand in our work and it worked out pretty well. We were still awed and amazed with the amazing things that happened but we gave the credit where it was due and that was good. I was talking with another Elder this week who baptized a good number of people this week and he wasn't like announcing it to the whole world or anything like that. He's actually someone that I knew at BYU and he is a great example to me. He's training right now and is LD. He was talking about the great importance of being humble.

Anways that's about it. Until next week! Love you guys!

Elder Horton