Working in the promised land

Olá família. :) Como vocês estão? Thank you for all the emails this week. I loved reading them. It's always nice to hear about all the projects on the house and about all the things happening in the family. Clarissa always sends me cute little updates on her family and Deka and I are planning out service activities for when I come home. It's also fun to read about Benjamin's mission.... serving up in the Land of the Ice Age.... I've have definitely never heard of church getting cancelled because of icy rain nor of missionaries getting to ride around on four-wheelers. It's definitely very different from my mission. :)

This week I think I may have died and gone to Heaven. Viseu is the promised land... not that we have golden investigators just running to get into the baptismal font, but I am so happy. I don't think I have ever been this happy in my entire life. There's just something so wonderful about working and having fun and being a missionary that is just perfect... I don't know. :) I'm just a pretty happy kid right now. 

We had some of the funniest and sweetest things happen this week. they're probably not funny to anyone but us but we loved all the little things that happened this week. We taught Tiago and his mom during our p-day and then later in the week we went back to give Tiago a chocolate bar and a birthday card for his birthday. He didn't expect us to even remember his birthday and I have never seen anyone so happy just to receive a birthday card. He didn't know how to react. He was so happy and he wanted to hug us or give us beijinhos, but he just patted our shoulders and gave us the biggest smile. Little things like that just make me so happy. I'm sitting here laughing about it right now because it was just the coolest thing to see how big of a difference it made in his day just by the fact that we remembered it was his birthday. Lesson learned: the little things we do make the biggest difference and Heavenly Father keeps track of all the little things we do. 

We started working in a part of our area called Santiago and we're going up there and knocking on doors as we try to find more investigators. It's a cute little area. It's got newer buildings and then it's got the little teeny tiny winding roads and close houses th
at everyone always imagines are in Europe. Those old areas are normally full of really old, really Catholic people that were "born Catholic, and will die Catholic just like their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents"... but no matter how cranky and stern they try to look I can generally get them to smile back at me as we're walking around. :) 

On Tuesday we had Conselho da Ala and afterward Bispo Daniel called all the missionaries into his office and told us that he and the bispado were talking about the group of missionaries this transfer, and they just wanted to let us know that they thought we were one of the best groups of missionaries they've had and that they know that great things will happen this transfer. Even if we don't baptize. He told us that we need to help teach the members to take better care of the recent converts so that when Heavenly Father blesses them with more new members, they will be able to feel like the ward is a big family to them. I think this ward already does a really good job of that most of the time. They're not perfect, but they are just the sweetest people in the world.  

I just made an interesting discovery..... this internet café place closes at 18h00.... which is in 6 minutes.... I need to pay more attention to my time usage. Woops. 

We had a week full of wonderful experiences... that you will hear about next week. 

I love you all! Remember to see everyone as Heavenly Father sees them. He loves all of us and wants us to love each other too. 

Síster Smith

P.S. The pictures are of the cathedrals on the skyline and then me and lovely Sister Regan.