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

Austin Ferrell	Sat, Aug 25, 8:21 AM
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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)