Peniche

We were invited to a baptism in the new Group located in Peniche.  They don´t have a chapel or a baptismal font...except for this one!  Two were baptized yesterday and one today.  It was cold, but a wonderful experience for all of us.

 

The Elders in Peniche are Elder Silva and Elder Crane.  They are actually in Caldas da Rainha, but commute to Peniche to teach and help.  We will have new Elders here in Peniche this coming Tuesday and the Group will open next Sunday.  Exciting!  By the way, the girl on the back row on the left and her fiancee in the sweater next to her will be married in about 3 weeks and then sealed in the Madrid temple a couple of days later.  She is a recent convert and he has been a member for a few years.  Great stuff!

 

 

César was baptized after about 4 months of teaching and fellowshipping.  He has taken this step very seriously and is well prepared.  He was so excited in church today after his confirmation.  One more for the little city of Beja!  Sister Urgiles and Sister Palmer did a great job.  He was also taught by Sister Nelson and Sister Rose.

Still Loving It

Things are still moving forward from day to day.  And, another baptism!


This one is Claudia.  She has investigated over a period of time and our missionary sisters here in Beja decided to go visit her.  I am sure they likely found her name in the area book.  When they showed up after a couple of visits, she was at the door and anxious to see them.  She had been praying for some peace in her life, and when they showed up she felt it was an answer to her prayers.  She felt the need for repentance and baptism and had been reading the Book of Mormon.  She has a four-year-old son.

The young man in the photo here is Daniel.  He was the one baptized just a few weeks ago.  He has been pretty sharp.  He performed the baptism well, except for an elbow that didn't go under the first time.  He graciously did the baptism one more time, without mistake.  He was the one baptized by Bruno, also a recent convert.  We love to see the church grow in this fashion!

 

Four of the people in this photo are recent coverts in the last four months in the small town of Beja.  Bruno, Daniel, Francisco and Rosalina.  And now we get to experience Claudia´s conversion!

 

And a beautiful scenery shot!

 

 

 

Christmastime 2012 in the Mission Field

We had an interesting Christmas Season to say the least.  We have been very busy, but it seems like the holidays are always like that.  But this year we did not spend as much time shopping as we usually do.  We spent our time doing missionary work.  Go figure!

 

About a week before Christmas we had a big Christmas conference for most of our missionaries in Portugal.  All of them were there except for the ones in the Azores and Madeira.  So, about 170 missionaries or so in one place.  Along with meetings focused on missionary work and on Christ and Christmas, we had a big Christmas dinner and party.  We spent a lot of time making fudge and Rice Krispie squares.  We helped out with the setting up and decorating and taking down.  We ate a lot of wonderful food.  We enjoyed seeing missionaries from all over Portugal.  We had the conference/party/dinner in the Lisbon area in one of their Stake Centers.  It is a beautiful stand-alone chapel and we used all of it.  Some wonderful Relief Society sisters from the area cooked some incredible food and they spent the entire day there.  And, you could really tell that the missionaries had a great time.

 

Although it was a lot of work for the senior couples, it was nice getting together.  We sometimes enjoy being able to relate to people of our own age and experience.  We can also speak English to each other, which is a relief! 

 



The rest of the days since we have written have been spent doing our normal missionary work.  For us, that means working with the leaders and members and helping out from time to time with discussions and baptisms.  We continue to have good growth down here with new members coming in by the week.  We are also seeing an increased emphasis on retention and reactivation.  The difficult thing down here in Portugal and Spain is that the economy is terrible and we have people leaving the country for work.  Many leave for other European countries and in Portugal we have a lot of members from Brazil who end up going back to Brazil.  It sometimes makes our attendance records look like they are flat because even though we are baptizing quite a few, and retaining more than before, there is still an out-migration.

A couple of interesting notes here:  Portugal is the leading baptizing mission in all of Europe.  Over the last 12 months it has more than double the number of baptisms of the next highest country, which is Spain.  Other countries throughout Europe are really struggling to find new converts.  There is a spirit and a momentum here that is palpable.  Most members in Portugal are first generation and the gospel is still relatively new.  It is exciting to see the growth and the preparation of branches to become wards, and districts to become stakes, and soon for the new temple to be built.  And here is an exciting new development:  Right now we have about 180 missionaries.  Are you ready?  By May we will have over 250 missionaries!  A lot of them will be sister missionaries.  Portugal is going to have some excitement while we are here to experience it.  And don’t even ask what the Mission Presidency is going to be doing over the next few months.  We will be having fun, I am sure.  J

Now, what were we doing Christmas Eve day and Christmas day?  We thought you would want to know.  If not, you can stop here. 

 

Christmas Eve day was awesome.  We spent the day with members and non-members.  The morning was spent with Brother Kocinba and his two children, Moroni and Nicole.  A few weeks before, I was instrumental, along with President Ruberval, in helping Moroni apply and prepare for a mini-mission of 3 weeks.  He is still 17 years old, but really wanted to serve and we have openings right now because of the movement of our missionaries.  Anyway, he got his call.  He was so excited you could not wipe the smile from his face.  When we found out that he did not have a suit, and couldn’t afford one, we decided that our gift this year would be a suit for a worthy young man.  Suits here are very reasonably priced so it wasn’t a difficult thing to do.  We went to the store with the three Kocinba family members.  We bought a new suit for Moroni, a simple bracelet for Nicole, and we gave Brother Kocinba a photo of us working together on a service project a few weeks ago.  They were all so grateful.  After we got back home, brother Kocinba called and invited us over for lunch.  He didn’t want us to be alone on Christmas!  We went into his home and he had cooked a wonderful Brazilian lunch.  We were in a small room with a round table.  There were five of us, and he only has four chairs.  We had salad and beans and rice and chicken…and Fanta grape!  It was wonderful, and truly a gift from someone who was sacrificing to make sure we were taken care of during Christmas.  That evening we spent at the home of a family from our branch.  The mom and dad are perpetual non-members who think they are members.  They frequently come to church and have been learning the gospel for about 5 years now.  Their children are baptized.  They seem to love the gospel.  We just cannot quite get them to get married so that they can get baptized!  Anyway, another great big meal.  We watched a Christmas video, visited, and then headed home about 1030.  Then, across the hall, we got invited over to spend the “evening”.  These are not members, but wonderful people.  They did not want us to be alone.  After explaining why whisky and wine were not our top preference, they gave us some 7-Up and some freshly squeezed orange juice.  We had two hours to get to know them, look at photos, and show them some of our family photos.  We went home across the hall at 1230 because they normally party on Christmas Eve until 3 or so in the morning.  Most people here open their gifts after midnight and don’t have the Christmas day gift-giving.  We hope we can introduce them a little more to the gospel.  We already gave their 29-year-old daughter, Diana, a copy of the Book of Mormon.

Christmas Day:  I need to be brief here.  We went to Lisbon and had a brunch with the other senior couples.  It was wonderful.  When we went out to our car to leave we found out that it had been broken into.  Unfortunately I left my briefcase in the car.  It had my computer, which pretty much has everything on it from our mission….photos, documents, etc.  It had my passport.  There was some money in the passport wallet.  It had all of our mission call information and paperwork.  It had all of my medical information.  It had our dictionary and the “Preach My Gospel” in Portuguese.  A few other things as well.  The feeling that it left us with is difficult to describe.  Some things are so difficult to replace…not financially, but emotionally.  The best part of our day came in the evening when we were able to Skype with all our children and grandchildren. After such a difficult experience, it was so calming and peaceful visiting with them and seeing the excitement of the grandchildren. It truly helped us re-focus on the things most valuable in life. It has been a daily healing process since that day, but we are recovering and moving forward with our missionary work.

Our memories of Christmas 2012 are joyous and sad.  We are most grateful for the Savior, for our family and friends, for the wonderful people of Portugal, and for the joy of the gospel that can heal us from our wounds.  And, we hope that whoever has our stuff takes the time to read “Pregar Meu Evangelio”.  J

 

 

These past few weeks have felt very unfocused.  The life of a missionary changes from day to day and we have found our circumstances to be the same.  We still are in Beja and love this little town.  Our travels to support the Branch Presidents and our District Presidency continue to take us to the southern coast of Portugal for at least a day or two each week.  We also continue to travel into the Lisbon area frequently for administrative things.  Things that we used to see as unique and exciting enough to take pictures of now seem commonplace.  Isn’t it interesting that our lives are like that?  How many things do we have in our own backyard and in our own family and our own ward that we take for granted?  How often do we miss the little things that happen all around us because we are too busy or too preoccupied?  Sometimes we “can’t see the forest for the trees”.  That is enough reflecting!

 

Hey, another baptism.  This one is Daniel.  He is a bright young man.  He lives alone as do so many people here in Portugal.  He has been looking for work for the past several months and found a good job just a couple of days after his baptism.  Paula sat in on a couple of lessons with him, bore her testimony and served as a great example for him.  He likes to practice his English on us and Paula practices her Portuguese on him!  He is already making friends with a few members of our Branch here.  Ironically, two of these new-found friends are recent converts themselves, Bruno and Francisco.  They are already practicing the importance of friend-shipping!  It is awesome to see.  And then we have our constant ward members like President Ruberval (Branch President) and Simao (Branch Mission Leader).  There are others as well that do their best to keep the church alive and bless and convert their own families.  We sure hope that the Beja Branch will flourish and qualify to become a ward while we are still here on our mission.  What a blessing that would be.  Almost all of the members down here are “first generation” and we can’t wait to see what transpires over the next twenty years as we get more experience, stronger conversions, more temple sealings, more missionaries going out, stronger youth programs, etc.

We have also experienced more transfers.  We have two brand-new elders, Elder Palmer from Texas and Elder Fonseca from Cape Verde.  We will have to tell you about the incredible number of missionaries from Cape Verde later, and the spirit they bring to Portugal.  We also had Sister Nelson transfer out and Sister Palmer from South Jordan transfer in.  We are not sure we can stay up on all of the transferring that goes on constantly in the mission field.  Every one of them bring new spirits and new testimonies and it is incredible to see how the Lord works through these young people.  One interesting thing right now:  Here in our area of the Algarve, we now have more “foreign” missionaries than “home-grown” missionaries.  We have them from Cape Verde, England, Belgium, France, Bolivia, Ecuador, Texas, Idaho and Utah.  Get this:  We have four from Utah and four from Cape Verde!  Here is a photo of one of our Cape Verde Elders that is serving as a Branch President in Tavira.  This is his second time as a Branch President.  His first go-around as a Branch President was in Cape Verde when he was 18.  Amazing young man.  Very quiet, very friendly, and a smile that just warms the room.  Here he is with his companion, Elder Hatch, who is heading home.  Also a great missionary and wonderful young man.

 

Besides our own District Presidency we have also been working long-distance with the Presidents in the Madeira District and the Azores District.  Right now, between our four districts (including Santarem) we have three new chapels in process and working on two (and maybe three) others.  We are also looking at organizing a new Branch in Madeira and a new Group in Peniche.  Both Larry and Paula are hoping not to do all of these long-distance, but to be able to travel to Madeira and the Azores to see them in person.   Two of the chapels in our Algarve area (Olhao and Loule) could possibly be done by May.  We are excited to see the progress of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Portugal.



Francisco Serra

Another awesome experience to report. Seems like they just keep coming! A few days ago Larry was asked to interview a man for baptism. He had special permission because those that would normally have done the interview could not come to our area. The sisters had been teaching him the Gospel and we had seen him at church several times. His name is Francisco Serra. He is about the same age as we are. Larry had been sitting by him in Priesthood Meeting so they were somewhat acquainted already. During the interview, Francisco asked Larry if he would baptize him. What an honor! We certainly didn’t think we would have the opportunity to have this wonderful experience. When Francisco arrived at the chapel for his baptism he had on a suit jacket, a white shirt and a tie.  He looked so happy.   Larry had learned the baptism prayer in Portuguese and he did a great job!! Paula hasn’t seen him baptize anyone since Mike and that’s been quite a few years ago. We truly love this gentle, humble man and know that he will be an awesome member of the church and will help strengthen this branch. We felt so privileged to be a part of this wonderful event in his life. It is one we will never forget.

Simao, Sheila and President Ruberval, Francisco, Larry, Rosalina, Maria, Paula, Sister Nelson, Bruno

 

And today, just before we posted, we went to Francisco's elderly parents' home and had a nice visit with them as well.  The sisters have been there a couple of times.  It is hard to tell right now what their level of interest is, but they listened carefully and were very gracious.  His mom appears bed-ridden and his father just fell down some stairs and broke his arm.  We hope to be able to do some more visits to them along with Francisco.  Another opportunity to help!



Happy Halloween Everyone! Halloween over here isn’t celebrated over here in the same way it is at home. Our little Branch here in Beja worked really hard to have a party like they do in America.  They decorated everything and it turned out really great. Their “treat” table looked just like it would at home! Some of the members even dressed up. We dressed up as missionaries and we were pretty scary!! It was a fun time for all who came.

 

 

We also had a Branch service project this past week. We cleaned, trimmed, and weeded around the church and also in a large fruit orchard next to the church. The orchard is a part of the Church’s property. We actually ate several ripe oranges off of one of the trees. It was a beautiful and sunny day and just the right temperature to be working hard. Here are a few pics so that you will  believe that we really do work here on our mission!! Of course, like all church events, there was lunch afterward.