WEEK 2: June 27, 2018

Oi!! I hope you all are doing well this week!! It has been a crazy week for me for sure!! The CTM is always moving and you rarely get a moment to just think. But it is okay, because as you know, I LOVE to keep moving.

Something awesome happened! I was asked to play the piano for a mission conference!! I am so excited about it!! I am playing the EFY Medly and others are singing it in Portuguese! I am just so glad to be playing the piano. I missed it a lot.

We have cleaning checks twice a week here and if we do well enough we get ice cream! There hasn't been ice cream for 9 weeks. But we got ice cream yesterday!! It was awesome to just eat something that reminded me of home. I miss a lot of things about home. And although ice cream can't replace Diet Coke, it was amazing.

You might be wondering why my PDay is today (It's a day early). Tomorrow Brazil plays in the world cup ⚽ and the streets get crazy. All anyone talks about is futbol here⚽. But the streets are too dangerous for us to be out tomorrow so we get PDay today! We get to go to the temple every week and I LOVE IT! It is like home away from home. We do have to wake up at 5AM, but it is SO WORTH IT. I just love being at the temple. I sent my mom some pics of me at the temple so if you wanna see them, hit her up!

Becca with her CTM District

I have been improving on my Portuguese so quickly! We have taught 6 lessons in Portuguese and one member lesson. Granted they were all fake, but the spirit was still there. My companion struggles with the language more than I do, but during our member lesson, she shared a story and the spirit was so strong. She found the words and got the message across. It was beautiful. The gift of tongues is real. How else could a small town utah girl learn how to testify of the gospel in Portuguese in 2 weeks! Its crazy to see miracles everyday here. 


So I decided to try and read the BoM in English before I start reading it in Portuguese. So I was reading it and I was reading in 1 Nephi about when Nephi and Sam and Laman and Lemuel go back to Jerusalem to get Ishmael's family. And in a lesson we talked about why they were much happier to go the second time, and we talked about eternal perspective. Some people say they just wanted to get married, but I love the eternal perspective idea. They knew that marriage was a necessary part of their spiritual, and temporal salvation in the wilderness. They had that perspective. When they went to get the gold plates, they didn't really know why. I think we can all try and have more an eternal perspective when dealing with hard things. The CTM is REALLY HARD. But when I can visualize in my mind, how happy the people of Porto Alegre will be when I tell them about the Plan of Salvation, it makes it much easier. I want to be the perfect vessel to bring the spirit into people's lives. I already love the language, I love the people, and let's hope Brazil wins the world cup or there is gonna be destruction in the streets of Sao Paulo. 



I love you all! Thanks for the support! I am sorry if my emails dont make sense, I dont have a lot of time and i have to write them on a portuguese keyboard. 


Love,

Sister Rebecca Hammond