Letter #37

My Dear Family,

   I do love you so much. I feel your love for me, and I feel it as I feel through the gospel, the love of our Eternal Father. I know He lives. Even though He is further from me than you are, I feel him close by when I need Him most.

  I looked forward to this week in my last email with hopeful anticipation, bordering, I think, on boasting. Well, as He knows best, I have been humbled this week, sufficiently to remember who´s work this is. Do you know those times when everything, everything seems to go wrong or just turn out upside down? I ´m sure you do. In these times, I feel that perspective is one of the most important tools we have. What really matters? you may ask. Am I doing my part? or What does the Lord want me to do? We must turn inward even when nothing seems to be our fault.

   This week we headed to Marilia for a wonderful zone conference with 3 zones and our leaders. I got to play the piano which I enjoy more and more each time: ) We had some wonderful object lessons such as a life size goliath taken down by one of our missionaries, David, with a slingshot and tennis ball. It was pretty sweet. Our Goliath in our mission is the goal of 200 baptisms in a month which needs to be taken down by our own faith. I also finally got to meet the wonderful Elder Peterson, now our AP. He is a fantastic missionary, and, would you know it, loves baseball too, having played at a junior college before the mission. Cool stuff. The other AP Elder Zioli is also one of the coolest people I've ever met, and, a surfer: )    I enjoyed one missionary´s answer to sister Tavares´question as to what causes stress: "Satan" Yes, yes he does: )

We sang, I played, a rousing version of Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel, and every time the word work was mentioned had to stand up in our seats. I joined in as pianist to the smiling approval of the president, hitting chords as I popped up and down off the bench:)

   Headed home late to Bauru, and slept for the second night there with Elders McGuire and Cox, where we were attacked by a mouse. We finally got it cornered, and I was more spectating then hunting, when it went for what it must have thought a gap and by instinct, instinct only I assure you, I came down on top of it with my shoe. Yep. So I killed a mouse kind of accidentally, with my shoe. . .

   The next day I had a division with Elder Lima, who is now on my top 5 list of favorite missionaries I´ve met. He is an extraordinary Elder only in the field for 1 month and it was an excellent productive day of work, in which we found lots of new people to teach.

   We finished the week with another conference, this one worldwide. Unfortunately due to malfunctioning technology, I got to see very little of it and most of that very little in portuguese. As such I leave my conference thoughts for next week after I have listened to all of it today or during the week. And more unfortunately, all of the new investigators we found and invited and all of the old, or recently baptized ones (with the exception of 2) did not attend conference, even though we repeatedly called, passed by and taught them all with this objective in mind. No one. It made me and Elder Beaudoin rather sad. But it did help us get excited to do it all over again!: ) We are turning over a new banana leaf here in Agudos, which if you have ever seen a banana leaf you know that they are big, which means even if its not easy to turn over, its BIG. You know?

   My thought is from conference so it's in portuguese, but I'll translate it out for you:

Oh! What a beautiful morning!
Oh! What a beautiful day!
I've got a wonderful feeling!
Everything´s going my way,

Love and Joy,

Tanner

p.s.- Only Elder Beaudoin and I recognized that song in conference. Didn't realize Brasil didn't do Broadway: )