(Week 27)

Hello all!

This last week was a blur!

We went to Fortaleza on Tuesday for a big mission conference where we heard from a member of the 70. Then the rest of the week was just working to build our area!

We have been working nonstop to help our area be more united becuase there is a lot of tention here between members. But our work is helping! Yesterday we had 51 people in church! This, again was the highest church attendance in the history of the Branch here! We had a lot of minus activos come which was awesome!

God also blessed us for trying our best, and while were were focused on fortalecendo the members here, he blessed us with an awesome young women who just showed up in church our first sunday and had a huge desire to be baptized! We baptized her in the river here on saturday!

Hope all is well with you all! 

Love,

Elder Ferrell

1)Leaving for Fortalez

 2)Elder de Souza (our district leader)

 )Baptism of Rayysa on Saturday

 4)Pizza night yesterday

Bro, I was already Baptised in your church! (Week k#26)

Hello World!

This week was crazy but good! We passed Monday traveling and in Fortaleza, then Tuesday left for Pedregal, a neighborhood in the city of Aracati, Ceara. To give you an Idea about our área, if you have seen the movie Glory Road, the scene where the new basketball players are on the bus for Elpaso Texas for the first time, and start wondering where in the heck they are becuase theres litterally nothing but dust for Miles, we understood this very well when arriving here in Pedregal. It is a city next to the beach, but it is also a desert, and has very strong winds that kick up and push around a lot of dust.

When we arrived  a tour house here, we spent most of the Day on Tuesday we arrived Just cleaning to allow it to be livable. The first night here was rough, but after that, cleaning little by little every Day, we were able to make things a lot better. Its a huge house sufficient for 6 missionaries that only Elder Passos and I are living in right now.

The awesome thing here is we actually have Members!!! We have lunches every Day and the members here are incredible. They havent had missionaries here for a long time, so the branch has been doing missionary work alone for the last few months. The Branch president is a very straight forward guy, but very dedicated and excited to work! Its cool because in his mind he never stopped serving a mission, and is determined to have his branch grow!

One such story was a result of this.

We had a plan to go visit an investigator with him, but after trying to call him numerous times, we started back to the Presidents house. Before we arrived, President told us we were still going to teach a lesson, and called a young man over to his house. President was doing some type of identification card for him, and told him to sit down and listen to our message while he worked on the card. So we started to teach him about the gospel of Christ, and when president finished he came and sat with us. We taught for about 25 minutes, and the lesson went well enough so I finally I gave elder Passos the signal to invite him to be baptized. After elder Passos invited him, it was quiet for about a minute, and then he responded:

´´Bro, I already was baptized in your church man´´

President looked supprised and went to go check his records while I tried my best not to start laughing, and President came back and sure enough, he had been baptized back when he was still a kid.

Thats the interesting part of our area, we have over 200 people that were already baptized, but when we arrived they had an attendance of only 22-30 people in church on sundays, with a branch record of 42 people. God worked through us a lot last week and yesterday in church we had 44 people, and more people arrived after sacrament meeting.

It was a good week!
Hope you all are well,

Love, Elder Ferrell

Isidio and Cristina, the married couple Elder Passos and I Baptized

Quixeramobim

 Baptism in the river last week

 Our first transfer

6 months ja? (already) (Week #25)

Hello all!
My email will be very brief today because it is a VERY busy day.

I got transferred, but the interesting part is I got transferred WITH my companion. We had a barbeque last night in the house of our group leader in Quixeramobim, and I was expecting to stay because I am training. Well, I am still training elder Passos, and President has asked me to go and open a new area!! 

I dont know how to spell the name of the area we are going to, so I will have more details next week.

I hope you all are well, I am praying for all affected by crazy weather conditions there. Hope everyone is safe!
Love and miss you all,

Elder Ferrell

Always on the Run (Week #24)

Hello All!

This last week was a blur, and we are always busy as bees here. I do not have much time to write today but will do my best. There were 2 main things that happened this last week. Saturday, we spent most of the day preparing for an activity we were hosting. Since we are just a group here, Missionaries are responsible for any activities planned with members and investigators, so we decided to host a Movie night (my parents will not be at all suprised that this was my Idea).

The room we have church in has a projector and the leader of our group has a computer, so we hosted a ´´Cinema´´ Where we played the movie 17 Miracles and had food and soda. It was one of our best activities because we had members from Quixada come and visit to help, but it was funny because if you have ever seen 17 Miracles, it is a good movie but has many sad parts...well we got through the whole movie up until the final sad part, and the Internet quit on us (we only had 2 minutes more to go!) so that was kind of funny because we had a lot of investigators there and we had to explain to them that there really was a happy ending and we didnt just invite them all to watch a depressing film.

Then the other thing was church yesterday! We only had 19 people arrive but it was an incredibly spiritual fast and testimony meeting. My recent convert, Isidio, blessed the sacrament for the first time which was awesome, then an investigator of ours who is waiting to get married to be baptized, stood up and bore her testimony about how the gospel has changed her life. It was awesome! But the funny part that happened was that last week Elder Passos and I encountered a strange man on the street. Whenever we talk to people and they dont really listen to us, we always just invite them to church and move on. Well yesterday in church when it was really quiet, we had a man that we had done this to actually show up. But it was how he showed up that was funny. We were in Gospel Principles class and all a sudden we hear in a loud booming voice ´´Jesus Christ is returning´´.....

One of the other elders here said he was close to falling on the ground because he thought this was it and Christ actually just showed up haha. He was an interesting character, and kept sharing scriptures from the bible with me although it was a Jehovas Whitness bible and so it was very different from the bible we are all used to. But after church he asked a lot of questions about the book of mormon and wants us to visit him! 

Thats it for this week!
Love and miss you all!

Elder Ferrell