Marituba 14

All of the streets are painted up for the world cup

Dear people,

This week was pretty busy and exciting.  On Thursday I got to go on divisions to Mosquiero, the area of two other Elders in our district and it was awesome.  The area there is huge and it is on a beach so it was pretty exciting.  My companion for the day was from Argentina, and yes, he has seen real wild penguins so that made me jealous.  His name was Paniagua, and yes, if you say it in Spanish his name literally means bread and water so we call him Elder Sacrament.  It was fun to be with a non Brazilian and was kind of funny to be two white foreign people.  He wants to learn English and marry an american so I helped him with English and he helped me with Spanish and it was a weird three language mind hurting day but lots and lots of fun.  We went to the beach and got lots of pictures.  

The 6 baptisms we had were super fun.  Lots of people came to watch and it was pretty exciting.  We had a little bit of a party after and played soccer and ate food, and I think everyone was super happy.  Also, Mateus, I had hold on to the camera to take pictures, and he had fun taking selfies and random pictures so that should explain some of them.  The world cup was lots of fun.  Everyone talks about how during the cup in other countries everything shuts down and no one does anything, but I didn't realize how true that was until yesterday.  Literally nothing was open and there were literally no cars on the street. Everyone was literally just screaming and watching the game. It was epic and completely awesome.  

My spiritual thought for this week would be [Nephi 7:16-21] when Nephi gets tied up by his brothers and they want to go back to Jerusalem Nephi prays and asks for strength to break the bonds and then after he bears his testimony to his brothers and they are humbled.  I think it's important to note that Nephi didn't ask for God to get him out of the bonds or stop his brothers he only asked for strength to be able to do it himself.  May times we are caught in a bunch of bonds and feel tied up and I think sometimes we ask God to fix it but we really should just ask for strength to be able to solve things ourselves.  One of our purposes here on Earth is to learn and grow and we won't be able to do that if God just hands everything to us; sometimes we need to figure things out ourselves.  I see a good example in lots of the people we baptized this week. Both the family of Jaycie and Gabrielli have strong opinions against the church and were fighting hard for them not to be baptized yet they still had faith to go through with it anyways.  To me they were really tied up by there families and had to pray for strength and they shared there testimonies and sadly there family wasn't humbled in the same way as Laman and Lemuel, yet both of them are still willing to press on and continue to have a strong faith.  

Love,

Elder Holcomb