The week without much Sleep (Week #77...almost)

Hello All!

Today will be a quick email because of time, but this week that passed was good!

We had a missionary get transferred here temporarily to stay with us while he is having some personal difficulties, and he's awesome! And Elder Nichols is getting transferred here at the end of the Transfer next week. Monday was technically our p day but we had to work all day. Elder Pasini and had to stay up until 2:30 in the morning editing some videos for President to use in the Missionary Council on Tuesday, so that was hard! But its all part of things!

Tomorrow we are praying that everything will work out with the Baptism of Brenos Brother, Ruan. (Breno is the young man who was baptised last week).

Ruan is 11 years old and an excellent kid. Its something pretty powerfull to me sometimes to see such incredible kids come out of such terrible circumstances. Just goes to testify once more that God truly does love and know each and every one of his Children.

But thats it for the week! 

I hope everyone is doing well there, and that everyone has a good week next week!

Love Elder Ferrell

6 Months More (Week #76)

Helloooooo All!

This Last week was a blur and the pace just keeps picking up every day!

We had 2 Baptisms on Saturday of Breno and Josias. 2 young Men that are incredible!

The week before last week we had the baptism of Fernando, and he invited us all over to his house for a Barbeque sunday as our lunch! Yesterday our ward limits were redesigned basically taking away a third of our ward, so were going to have to work a ton to keep things from falling. Its pretty stressful trying to do the work I normally did in 8 hours in only 3 now, but until now its working out! All of my companions and I are working hard together and being blessed for that! 

On the office side my life is a sea of baptisimal forms, medical health plan cards, material requests and travel planning. But somehow until now im staying above water! This week is the last normal week we have of the transfer. Next week President will pass the transfer to us and the enormous work load begins again. But I was born ready for it!

Other than that there isnt a whole lot of news! Hope you all are doing well! Have a good week!

Love Elder Ferrell

1) Im Official!

 2) Batptism of Breno and Josias

3) Baptism of Fernando

4) Pizzas when we baptize!

The one where miracles fall out of the sky (Week #75...almost)

Austin Ferrell	Sat, Aug 25, 8:21 AM
to abigail.harbour, alyssaletts, arnold.top, carter.m, cazcadet33, d.petey, danjamvincent, deborah.hall, elizabeth.marshall, ensing97, gramanerd, guyeferrell, jeremiah.tolento, jimenez.ashley, kabecker, kaylee.covello, kaylynn.bennett, Kimberly, kiplynferr, lauren.ogden, leonardo.herculano, meganliddiard6, mrknudsen, nathan_aina, rivatt, sarai.pendleton, sixlidds, thomas.rogers, tim, topfamily_zoo, va10smith, VA10smith, vimiciusm1992, wampakumark, Aaron, Alan, Alexis, Amanda, Amber, Andee, Andrea, Angela, Anita, Arlene, Ashley, Benjamin, Bob, Caitlyn, Carissa, Carlos, Catherine, Celina, Chad, Charles, Chloe, Chris, Christie, Conrad, Craig, Dave, David, Deen, Denise, Dennis, Devin, Kevin, DjLinks, Geoff, Gina, Hannon, Heather, Hunter, Hunter, Icecreamninja_01, Jacob, Jacqueline, James, jeff, Jeff, Jenny, Jeremy, jerry, joel, John, Jonathan, Joshua, Joshua, Kim, Kolby, Kristi, Lance, Laura, Lisa, Mandy, Marcel, Matt, me, Merry, Michael, Nathan, neil, Page, Parker, Paul, Race, Riana, richard, Roxann, Serrin, Shaelyn, Sherri, terry, TJ, TJ, Trevor, Tricia, Yeon, Zachary, Riana

Hello all! 

First off, this weekend is the weekend I say thank you to my parents for getting married so that i could exist. Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad!!!!

Anyways,

This last week passed by in a blur. With so many things to learn it was hard to keep up at first but I am starting to settle into the grind of things.

One cool thing is seeing the way God blesses us for all the work we do! Even though we only have more or less than 3 hours to work each day, we are bombarded by people who want to learn the gospel. This last week Elder Pasini and I found a group of young men on the steet and took them to the church to play soccer. After that they came to the church every night this week to Participate in the nightly activities, wether it be mutual, seminary, or just pick up games of soccer, and they always ask us to share a message with them! We are praying that they will go to church tomorrow!

Wednesday night, a man showed up at the church and apparently look at it and said something along the lines of ´´Yep, this is the church I was looking for, how do i join your church?´´ A member showed him to the instatue class, and he participated and love it!

The next night he came again for instatute and we were able to teach him a little bit. Even though we were just getting to know this guy, we felt he definitly was one of Gods elect, so that night in the first visit we invited him to get married with the girlfriend he has lived with for 9 years, and to be baptised. The next day after that he brought us all the necisary paper work for him to participate in the mission wedding this next month! And the whole time he has been reading and study about the church, and is super excited to bring his daughters to participate in primary tomorrow!

And the best for last, today we have the Baptism of Fernando Whoop Whoop!!!!!!

Fernando is the husband of a member who never wanted anything to do with the church before, but 2 weeks ago we had lunch there and he listened to the message at the end, and that night his wife called us saying he wanted us to teach him the lessons. He went to church last sunday and loved it, and today at 3 PM he is going to get baptised!!! 

Just goes to show that if we truly give our all to the Lord, no matter what our calling may be, he blesses us and guids us to fulfill our work!

Thats all for the week this week!

I hope everyone is well and has an excellent week next week!

Love 

Elder Ferrell

P-Day! (Week #74)

Wow soo it is definitly rough passing a week without P-Day!

Hello all! 

The week last week passed pretty fast and was not super eventful. It was just full of learning and...well being a secretary... haha

My trainer was transferred so ready or not Im executive secretary now! I have no idea what im doing but ohh well! 

We were able to work our butts off in the little time we had to proselite and managed to bring 6 people to church. One guy there really loved it and im pretty sure will be baptised this next Sunday!

Hope you all are doing well there in the States!
Love 

Elder Ferrell

The Office (Week #73... almost)

Hello all!

So week 1 in the office is coming to a close! I am writing you today because when there are 4 secretaries we have alternating p-days. Basically we will have 1 week with no P-day and the week after we will have 2. So after today my next p-day will not be until the Monday AFTER this Monday thats coming right now.....its kinda wierd. But the first week in the office was pretty crazy. I arrived in the mess of the transfer, and apparently this was one of the worst transfers in the history of the mission. Everything was disorganized, we had a group of 15 missionaries leaving to go home, and a group of 16 arriving. We had to deal with the travel and meals and logistics of everything and it was all just crazy. So there is definitly a lot to improve here, and after a few more interactions with president I can see he wants things to get a lot better and I can see a lot more why he called me to be here. 

Other than work work work in the office trying to learn everything, nothing really happened this week.

I hope everyone there is well and enjoying the new school year!

Love you all,

Elder Ferrell

The Secretaries (Week #72)

Hello all!

Just a quick update today! I was transferred to the mission office to be Executive Secretary of the mission.....sooo i dont know what that means but its sure to be an adventure.

I was super sad to leave Lagoa Redonda. Last week we worked our butts off and managed to brind 8 investigators to church! That was awesome! One of them was an 18 year old young man who is called David. He stopped us on the street to speak English with us, and when we asked him to share a message with him, he said that we could because he was trying to work on his spiritual side. We went to his house a few days later, and taught him about the restoration, and at the end of that message he wouldnt commit to anything at all, but he said he felt something he never felt before in his life while we were teaching him. He wouldnt accept any invitations we extended, but Sunday he showed that he really did feel the spirit by just showing up out of nowhere at church! He loved it! 

The only better way i could have ended the Transfer in Lagoa Redonda would have been to baptise David while i was there, but I was super happy God blessed us with people visiting church!

Now lets see how secretary life is!

Love you all, hope you have a good week!
Elder Ferrell

The one where the you are helping in the Gathering of Isreal (Week #71)

Hello all and Happy P Day!

This week was quite busy as we had our Zone conference on Tuesday, then Wednesday we moved to a new house and Elder Romero got sick again. Sooo that was fun! But, we were able to work the rest of the week! Once again we had to accept the lords timing on Sunday with havin no investigators in Sacrament meeting again, but we had an excellent meeting with our Bishop yesterday where he asked us to start working in an area thats a lot closer to the church building so that should be good!

In the Zone conference, President Leite invited all youth preparing to serve a mission come and participate with us in the conference, and that was pretty awesome! But there was one part were a young man from our ward, who lives in the other missionaries area stood up and proclaimed that the youth in the ward wanted to help with missionary work but the missionaries never involved them! This, while being a roast, was a good roast, and gave Elder Romero and I an Idea. Last night, under the direction of the bishop, we had a mini MTC meeting with all the youth in our ward that had a desire to participate in the missionary work. We had some fun, started to teach them how to be missionaries, and at the end of the night gave them each companions and divided them into 2 districts, chose some of the more active and involved youth to be the ´´district leaders´´ and put them to work. Now instead of our ward having just two missionary companionships, it has 2 complete districts! Every sunday Missionary Prep class was changed to be our ward District Meetings, and everyone is super excited. It truly is inspireing to see the faith and courage of our youth here in sharing the gospel, which is litterally saving lives here. It truly gives yet another proof that our wonderful Profet truly is called of God. The challenge he issued to youth in the world to participate in the gathering of isreal is being taken very seriously here. I pray every day that the same faith and excitement is being put to use in every single part of the world! 

Other than thes main events nothing out of the ordinary happened this last week!

Hope you all are well! 

Love Elder Ferrell

Chill Week (Week #70)

Hello All!

Just a really fast email today!

Everything is good here in the Lagoa Redonda ward. Elder Romero and I focused a lot on teaching with the members this last week to try and get some good references of people to teach. We had 4 awesome investigators progressing really well but none of them were able to make it to church because of the distance. 

We went to the city of Cascavel this last wednesday to do a split with the missionaries there and that was cool! It was a beautiful city that reminded me a little of Quixada!

Other than that nothing new really happened here, just the daily grind!
Hope you all have a good week!

Love Elder Ferrell

Mom is adding the following from her personal message this week...

My week was good. Everyone is healthy and we are hopefully moving to a new and wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy wyyyyyyyyyyy better house this week so that makes me happy. 

We worked a lot with the members this last week which was interesting.  The members are the only way we will be able to get some momentum here because the church is soo far away from our area that we cant get people to go to church. To put it in perspective, our ward covers the same amount of space as if all of San Fernando Valley AND Santa Clarita, and imagine that our church building was the only place for all these people to go to church. Now imagine that even though our church building is there in valencia, as missionaries we were assigned to work in San Fernando to try and build up that area to open up a ward there, and that's how our area is, minus the fact that this isn't america and not everyone has cars.....SOO were having to pray and work a lot to find the miracles here but there's definitly people here waiting for us!

Well......the other side is interesting (Week #69)

Hello All!!

Elder Romero became sick on monday night, and Tuesday morning woke up a lot worse. We went to the Hospital thinking it was just a quick flu or something. NOPE! The doctor there scared the crap out of him by passing the diagnosis of ´´we are pretty sure you have Dengue!´´ The funny part about this moment was that Elder Romero, being a little bit similar in personality, have a habit of whenever something happens that is really serious or just super difficult, to take the news in an out of body experience way, and just laugh at the fact that the situation is so sucky and we have the worst luck sometimes. So when the doctor very seriously told Elder Romero that he has Dengue and could not get out of bed for the next 4 days, we both just looked at each other and laughed. Then we spent the next few days in the apartment talking about everything and more, until Friday when we went back to the hospital to see if he was better. NOPE!! The doctor said if he didnt get better before today that he was going to have to be interned in the Hospital until he improved. We laughed again.... sometimes the only thing you can do in life, is laugh at how rough things are and keep going. He seems a lot better now and were hoping for a much better update from the doctors today! Its still not confirmed that he actually had Dengue but whatever it was, it wasnt fun haha.

Also Happy Birthday to my big Bro T.J.! He turned 34 this week!!!

That was our week here in Lagoa Redonda! Hope you all are well there in the good Old Dengue free US of A!

With lots of love,

Elder Ferrell 

(just kidding T.J. i know you turned 26)

Eusébio (Week #67)

Hello all!

This week was pretty busy!
Elder Romero is awesome! Were already pretty great friends and our American filled house never has a dull moment. 

We are litterally opening a new area so thats proving a little slow as can be expected. There were missionaries working here before, but they didnt do anything, and didnt write anything in the area book because....well.....they never told anyone that they didnt have an area book. So were literally starting from 0. We have to pay 4 reals every day to just get to our area and it is a much wealthier part of Fortaleza. This is good because a lot of people have cars, and the chapel is so far from our area, that people would have to walk for 2 hours to get there on foot, and because of lack of public transportation there bascially the only way we can get people to go to church is if they have their own transport. But it also makes things a lot more slow because the wealthy are wealthy because they work and never are home, and a lot of them are a little less inviting. 

BUT the Lord has already blessed us a lot with people sincerely interested to teach!

It is so strange being part of a REAL world with a real chapel and everything! Church was soo cold yesterday!

But long story short, Its so good to be a missionary!
Love you all, have a good week!

Elder Ferrell

"There's a cat in our house!" (Week #66)

Austin Ferrell	12:06 PM (21 hours ago)
to abigail.harbour, alyssaletts, arnold.top, carter.m, cazcadet33, d.petey, danjamvincent, deborah.hall, elizabeth.mars., ensing97, gramanerd, guyeferrell, hasmith, jacob.davis95, jeremiah.tolen., jimenez.ashley, john.spees, kabecker, kaylee.covello, kaylynn.bennett, Kimberly, kiplynferr, lauren.ogden, leonardo.hercu., meganliddiard6

Hello All!
The biggest news of the week is that I got transferred to be the Zone Leader of the Leste zone. My new companion is Elder Romero from North Carolina, and were opening an area in Lagoa Redonda, Fortaleza.

I was a bit bummed to leave Horizonte, that was an incredible city there!

We will see how it goes! Im excited to finally be in an area with a real church building and a real ward! That will be interesting!

Our house has 2 companionships living there, and the other companionship are both Americans too, Elders Withers and Rogerson. Things should be pretty great!

The funniest story from this last week happened saturday night. Elder Mortensen and I were asleep, but there was a lot of noise on the street so I wasnt sleeping too great, and I woke up at 2 AM because of a cat Meaowing really loud. I thought that it was coming from outside of the front gate, so I didnt worry about it too much, and after a while it stopped. Then out of nowhere started up again but this time in our bedroom! I looked over and there was a little tiny kitten in the middle of our room just meaowing its little head off! I kinda sat there for a minute gathering the force of will to get up and throw the cat out of our house when Elder Mortensen woke up. He woke up, moved a little bit, and then gave a fast start and shouted ´´Theres a cat in our house!!´´ He always was so good at identifying a situation haha. I got up and threw the cat out the back door so it couldnt just walk back in, but then it somehow found its way alll the way around to the front of our house again and came back in and did the same thing......Elder Mortensen was not happy. Long story short, the cat ended up in a box, and I had to carry it with me fro 30 minutes after leaving to work on Sunday just to make sure it didnt wander back to our home!

Thats about it for the week!
Hope everyone is well!
Love

Elder Ferrell

Pics

1) Ward activity last saturday

2) The cat....

3) Saying goodbyes to recent converts

4) Lunch with the new crew!

The World Cup (Week #65)

GOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLL!!!!!

Hello all! I´m gonna be real with everyone, while the World cup is cool, and I would be loving this stuff outside of a mission, right now it is just a major distraction! 

It is very cool to be in the atmosphere of it all. Brasil gets pretty lit for the cup, everyone as streamers going across the street, everyone is selling brasil jerseys, and you can hear fireworks going off basically every 5 minutes. Its cool for the expericence, but yesterday Brasil played their first gaime at 3 PM....our church meeting starts at 4 PM.... That one was a little rough haha. BUT it was incredible to see the Lord work miracles. 

Because of the game of Brasil yesterday, we only had 2 of the 6 people waiting to be confirmed actually get confirmed. The other 4 werent allowed to go to church because they were either at home with a lot of family visiting and their parents wanted them to stay with family, or their parents didnt want them to leave their house because its super dangerous here while there is a Brasil game because well.....people dont thing as clearly as normal. So that was a bit rough. 

But now the miracles! It was impossible to stay sad about the confirmations when we arrived in church and had more people in church this week during the Brasil church than last week!!!! On top of that there were 8 less active members who came to church yesterday that was the first time Elder Mortensen and I had even seen them in church! 

The biggest miracle of all was the Baptism of Ingrid which happened yesterday...

Ingrid is the kind of person that when you look at, it could be easy to judge just because of her situation. She always was with her group of friends that hang out at a mini gang hideout. She was always surrounded with lots of alchohol, drugs, and all kinds of iniquity, but luckily we have a loving Father in heaven who truly prepares his children to receive his gospel! Ingrid is the sister of Ana Clezia, our recent convert who got married and baptised a few weeks ago. We want to teach and baptise the entire family of...well...everyone, so we started teaching Ingride 3 weeks ago. Starting with the first lesson when she cried during the closing prayer we knew she was one of Gods Elect. The more we taught her, the more greatful we were that we didnt just pass her by because of the way things looked from the outside. We found out she had never drank in her life, never used drugs, and basically was already living all of the commandments outside of going to church on Sunday. Every lesson we taught here she started crying in her prayers, and always thanked God for what was happening in her life right now. We found out that the group of ´´friends´´ she is always with are actually family that she wants to help. Yesterday she was baptised and literally was so happy afterwards!

Take that Satan!

Hope you guys all have a good week this week, and as far as the world cup is concerned, may the best Brasil team win!

Love,

Elder Ferrell

1) Ingrid´s Baptism

2) Elder Mortensen

3) Every street in Brasil Right Now

4) Inacio´s Birthday Saturday

The Busy Life (Week #64)

Hello All!

This last week was really busy!

Tuesday we had Mission Leadership Council that went really well! It was cool because Elder Passos, the first missionary I trained, is a Zone Leader now too so we got to catch up a little bit with each other.

After that, Wednesday and Thursday we did 2 splits with companionships in our zone that were having a bit of difficulty, and those went really well. Friday and Saturday were normal days, then Sunday morning we had 5 baptisms!!!! After the baptisms we ate lunch and then we went on a split with members so that I could acompany 2 of our recent converts, Rogerio and Elizaldo, to Pacajus to be interviewed by the Stake presidente to receive the Melkesideque priesthood. (yes, i dont know how to spell Melkesideque) and Elder Mortensen could still accompany our investigators to bring them to Stake conference that happened in Pacajus yesterday. Long story short everything worked out, and they are now ordained elders and we had a wonderful stake conference! One cool thing was that the Stake Presidente told us that the stake is going to be divided and they are going to create a new stake here with our ward and a couple of other wards close to Fortaleza! 

The biggest story from the week though were our baptisms from yesterday. They were from 2 families. 3 were the step children of a less active member we found a few weeks ago. Yesterday we baptised everyone in that house that could be baptised right now and are excited to work with the parents here in the future to reactivate or baptise them! The other 2 were part of the lords Elect to be sure! It was a brother and sister who we met 3 weeks ago. The young man, Inacio, was soo excited about the gospel. He started to read the Book of Mormon every day, he loved church, he always is excited to know more, and is really set on serving a mission when he turns 18 now! He was soo excited to get baptised that he almost cannonballed into the baptismal font when it was his turn to be baptised! His sister, Ingride, is really shy and almost never says anything, so while we already knew that Inacio was really excited about the church, we had no idea what she would say to the invitation to be baptised, but when we asked, ´´Ingride do you want to be baptised too´´ the word YES flew out of her mouth before we had even finished talking! Their mom was soo happy for them to get baptised!

It truly was a week of miracles this last week! 

Love you all have a good week up there!

Elder Ferrell

1) Baptism of Bruno (from last week, first time his dad, Rogerio, baptised)

2) Baptisms of Eduarda, Emily, Marcelo, Inacio, and Ingride

3) Elder Passos with all the tall Elders on the Mission

Real Fast... (Week #63)

Hey everyone!

This last week passed by fast!

The biggest news is that yesterday we had the baptism of Bruno. He is the son of Rogerio, the guy who got married and baptised last week! Rogerio received the Preisthood yesterday so he was able to baptise Bruno! It got a little complicated because Bruno was affraid of water, but it all worked out in the end.

Actually it was a little funny because the baptism had already started and Elder Mortensen leaned over and asked if I had certainty that Rogeiro had officially received the Priesthood already. I figured it was a good question so I went to sit by bishop to ask. Bishop was there participating in the Baptismal service, but its good we asked because when I said it, Bishop called Rogerio into his office to officially give him the authority to baptise his son....not a tradicional day but it all worked out!
Hope you all have a good week!
Love,

Elder Ferrell

Extra Extra! Read all about it! (Week #62)

Hello world!

Well I have two peices of interesting news, and I will start with the good part! This last saturday Ana Clezia and Rogerio got married and baptised!!!! They were confirmed yesterday in sacrament meeting, and Rogerio is now preparing to receive the Priesthood, and their entire family is preparing to be sealed in the temple 1 Year from now!!!

Its these kinds of moments that keeps us missionaries going!

The other part of the good news is last sunday, my first area, Quixeramobim, was officially made into a Branch, and I am 90 % sure that one of my Recent Converts there, Isidio, is part of the Branch Presidency! What an exciting week!

In other news. All the Truckers here decided to go on strike because Gasoline is around 20 Reals a gallon here (imagine gas being 20$ a gallon in the US!?) But the thing is that Brasil Exports a lot of Gasoline to other contries so the Truckers wouldnt have it. They have currently barricaded the Freeway going into fortaleza, so that makes travel a little rough, and none of the gas stations here in Horizonte have gas because its too expensive for them to buy. The biggest concern is that there also is not any food shippments being made, so none of the stores can restock on supplies.

Its getting interesting!!! No need to worry, there still is Pleanty of food here, and as our Bishop said: ´´When the world cup starts everyone will just go home anyways´´ so itll all work out!
Thats about it for the week I hope you are all doing well!
Love 

Elder Ferrell

All pictures are from the wedding and Baptism of Ana Clezia and Rogerio!

They both do basically MMA, thats whey the wedding topper with the boxing gloves was a classic. Side Note: Missionaries get really truncky at weddings

What a Week! (Week #61)

Well this week was WEIRD!!

Monday night our group of 14 american missionaries went to the airport to leave for Sao Paulo. We went from Fortaleza to Natal were we caught the connecting flight to Sao Paulo. We arrive in sao paulo at about 3 AM, and from there got into a van that drove us to the police station. On the way we stopped at some place to eat breakfast that looked like the USA! But was sooo expensive! After Breakfast we arrived at the Police sation at around 7:30 and had to wait for them to open at 8. There we did everything with our visas, went to eat mcDonalds on the way to the airport, and went back to Fortaleza! It was a really fun trip actually! Nobody slept, but it was nice to pass a little bit of time with Americans, and Sao Paulo was sooo......Modern!

Then, Wednesday Elder Mortensen called me to tell me President had asked us to help out a companionship that was having problems. What happened was there was a missionary who is about to go home training a new missionary from Guatamala, and they were fighting a lot, until the New missionary called President wanting to go home. President Leite sent Elder Mortensen to their area to stay with the Elder who is finishing his misison for the week, and Elder Solares from Guatamala came here to Horizante and was my companion for the week. It was a bit difficult because with Elder Mortensen in the other city, I was following up with the zone all alone! But everything worked out. Elder Solares is a good guy and I am pretty sure he will be ok now and finish out his mission.

The other noteworthy part of the week was yesterday. I woke up with suchh a bad headache, then went to ward council and after to visit a few people, but i was getting super weak by the minute! I am not sure what it was but I was soo sick. We had to call sister Leite and she had us go home and rest in our house, then we went to sacrament meeting, and had to leave after for me to rest more and for Elder Solares to pack his suitcases! Today I am feeling much better but man it was strange!!!! 

Thats about it for the week though! Elder Mortensen is back now and this week we have the wedding of Rogeiro and Ana Clezia and they will be baptized right after! Its gonna be good!

Have a good week everyone!
Elder Ferrell

1) Road Trip!!!! (but on a plane)

2) This breakfast was 29 Reals!!!! :(

3) Lunch at McDonalds

4) Sao Paulo Airport