When we want what we have, we will already have what we want!

          Hey everyone!  I hope you guys are all doing well.  I´m sorry to hear about the passing of Grandpa Newman.  I hope everyone in the family is doing ok.  This is why the knowledge of the Plan of Salvation is so important and special for us.  It´s like in President Uchtdorf´s talk last october where he talked about how people a hundred years ago could have never imagined how big the universe is until technology was improved and their perspective was enlarged.  When you have a small perspective on things death seems like something really sad but with the knowledge we have of our Heavenly Father's plan for us we realize that death is just the passing from one stage to the next.  I can´t help but feel extremely happy and excited for Grandpa who has now moved on to the next stage and is now together with Grandma Newman again.  I´ll keep the family in my prayers.

            So this week was awesome!  I´ll start from the beginning.  So on Sunday we were walking down the street to go get our investigators to bring to church and we met this guy on the corner.  One minute sooner or one minute later we would have missed him.  Anyways we talk to this guy who´s name is N. and he asked where our church was.  Turns out he had been taught by some missionaries a while back but he moved and the missionaries changed so he kinda just lost contact.  So we ended up taking him to church and we talked to him a little more.  He had a desire to be baptized but he didn´t feel like he could because he didn´t know everything about the church but we had a good little lesson with him and he accepted baptism!  So we baptized him that very same day!  It was fast and testimony meeting and he stood up and bore such a good testimony about repentance because he used to drink and use drugs and all that stuff but he has left all of that to follow Jesus Christ.  It was so good!  So anyways, I had the opportunity to baptize him and when I lifted him out of the water he just started to cry and gave me the biggest hug.  It was definitely one of the most special experiences I´ve had on my mission so far.  I was also able to baptize one of the sister´s investigators that I helped teach a few times.  That was also really cool.  Anyways, We´ve been back to teach N. a few times and he is so strong!  We´ve been talking to his mom also and his sister who was baptized but stopped coming to church a long time ago.  I challenged his mom to baptism and she accepted and we´re working on getting his sister to come back to church.  It was a testimony strengthener to me that Heavenly Father will guide our steps.

             So we had a good leadership training this week where all the zone leaders get together for a training.  It´s kinda weird.  There are all of these old missionaries who have all sorts of experience and then there´s me.  And as secretary I´m supposed to give a training to them.  I felt a little out of place not gonna lie.  It´s like, what can I as a fairly new missionary say to all of these seasoned and experienced missionaries that will help them?  But anyways, I gave it and I think it went pretty well.  It was nothing too special but I survived haha.  Sister Soares, the president's wife, gave a good training.  One of the things that caught me that she said was instead of having what we want we need to want what we have.  That really stuck out to me.  Because when we want what we have we will already have what we want.  It just depends on how we look at things.

              This week I was also able to give a blessing of health to S., the sisters' investigator that I baptized on Sunday.  It´s always pretty nerve wracking to give a blessing in Portuguese but it went pretty good.  When we first got to his house he wouldn´t shake our hand because he didn´t want to get us sick but after the blessing he went around shaking everyone's hand so that was pretty cool. 

              Anyways, my trainer left this week so now it´s just me and Elder Durê in the office.  Things have been going pretty smoothly so far haha.  I´m just not looking forward to transfers cuz that´s when everything gets crazy!  But yeah, that was about it for this week.  It was a week full of miracles.  Big ones and small ones but it is true that God is STILL a God of miracles.  I love you all and I hope you guys have a great week.  A igreja é verdadeiro!

Elder Harris