HOTEL!! :)

Hello everybody once again!  Another great week in the mission field!  I am super happy out here, we are having some troubles in our work!  Julio was not given permission to be baptized this week but he is so awesome!  He said that that doesn't change him.  He will still keep coming to church and doing everthing right and he says that the day will come for sure.  He has so much great faith!:)  Other than that we found a great guy named Jorge!  He his going through some rough trials in his life right now and said that after we got done talking he didn't feeling burdened and that he felt something, a spark of hope, something he hadn't felt before.  He was also my testimony builder this week that I will share here in a second.

Just in other news, so this week we had to go do some baptismal interview for one of our DL's in Mirandela.  So we went there and did one for this awesome young man that had a great testimony and was baptized this past weekend.  BUt the other one we went to the womans house and she was not there so we went looking.  We went to her sisters house and asked and she said she didn't know, so we continued looking until late that night.  Well Mirandela is like 2 and a half hour bus ride from Gaia and we missed the last bus of the day.  So we were like alright we will just sleep here.  Which normally would be fine but the Elderes there didn't have extra beds.  So Elder Brown was like, " I am not sleeping on the ground!"  So he called the office Elders and he got us permission to sleep in a Hotel!!!  Now that isn't that crazy for you normal people but for missionaries it was a pretty cool change!  The best part was the free continental breakfast in the morning!  It was so great for us al the other missionaries were super jealous of us! So that was fun!

Then today for p day we celebrated thanksgiving with a turkey bowl!  WE played at this indoor soccer place that was super cool.  BUt it felt great to celebrate Thanksgiving some way!  I can't believe how fast November is flying by.... kind a scary! 

SO going back really quick to the story of Jorge.  First off, I feel that within the chruch there may be a few exagerations at times and these things sometimes give people a wrong idea or understanding with important principles of the gospel.  The example that I will give has to do with promptings of the spirit and on the spot revelation.  When I came into the mission field I expected to have many experiences where I would feel randomly to turn down a road or knock a specific door or talk to specific person.  Up to this day I have not had an experience like this, but I had heard so many stories about this kind of stuff!  I thought many times Am I just a bad missionary, am I just not worthy? Why am I not recieveing more clear promptings to tell me stuff.  But I have learned a few things about this and let me jsut stress that this is my personal opinion.  Now I believe that these kind of experiences but I, with Elder Bednar, believe that they are more rare than common.  For example:  ON thursday Elder Brown and I were working in the morning and our appoinment fell through so we just kind of started walking, then we came to this round about and we stopped and I was like do you want to knock this building (pointing to the building closest to us) then he was like I don't know we can knock one of these ones.  Then I was just like eh why not this one?  (In that moment I do not recall any prompting telling me which building to knock it was jsut the closest one) So we went and rang like 20 doorbells with few responses.  Then while almost halfheartedly pushing buttons one of the last ones i pushed was Jorges.  He came down let us in and we had a great first lesson with him and he was really accepting and seems to have a lot of potential to progress and really accept baptism.  Now with this story I could have exagerated my experience a little bit saying that an overwhelming feeling came over me to knock that building but that is not what really happened.  What happened what that me and Elder Brown were being good boys and doing what we wer supposed to be doing.  When we are doing that the spirit guides us almost unconciously more times than being specifically prompted to do stuff.  anywho we are getting kicked out but I love you all!  

Elder Eldredge