Brock - July 10

So this week I was reminded that God hears and answers our prayers. I haven´t been writing too much about it (actually, I haven´t said anything at all until now), but my companion is kind of difficult to be around. He talks about a lot of inappropriate stuff, he just wants to baptize people without repentance and stuff like that, and his favorite past-time is to annoy me. But, I´ve been determined not to say anything about it, and to just keep going until the end because it´s so close. Yesterday though, it was getting really hard and I wasn´t really handling it anymore. So I went into the other room, sat for a few minutes, and then was overcome by the urge to kneel and pray. So I did. I talked with Him about what I was going through, that I justed wanted to do what was right, to feel the Spirit. I asked for strength and patience to go through the next two weeks with my companion. I thanked Him for my mission and all the things I passed through, and for His exceeding mercy on me. And then I went back into the other room. About twenty minutes later, the assistants called, like they always do on Sunday night, to follow up on how the zone went that week. After they followed up a little bit, the assistant asked "Do you guys like emergency transfers?" (he thinks he´s funny). So, it´s a long story. Last week, this Australian Elder (a zone leader in Salto, my old area) who played rugby before the mission tore a ligament in his knee. And has another ligament in his knee tearing as well. So he went to the mission office. They´re still seeing if he can do the surgery here or if he´ll have to go home. If he goes home there´s probably no way for him to come back, because it takes like a year to get a visa between Australia and Brazil. So anyway, his companion was in trio, and they wanted to fix that. So my companion is going there! It´s not that my companion is a bad guy, he´s just difficult to live with and he doesn´t care about what other people think of him. (He kind of has a superiority complex). So didn´t really care that he bothered me--on the contrary, he enjoyed bothering me. But anyway, that is almost all over now. My companion for the last two weeks will be Elder T, from Honduras.

In other news, today was probably my last normal P-day. Next week I´ll probably have my last interview with President (actually, it´ll only be my second), we´ll go to the temple and have the self-sufficiency course. Then the week after that, I´ll be at the mission office, basically just waiting for my flight. Today we met up with the district leader and his companion to make pizza (we made a very fat pizza, which took longer than expected) so we just did that today.

Last week we had a bunch of meetings. We had the "Meet the President" activity, the leadership council meeting, and interviews with President on three separate days. President Ribeiro seems nice, but I simply won´t have the time to get to know him for him to have a significant or even fleeting impact on my mission. He is certainly very different than President Farnes. That´s probably a good thing. President Farnes had the right vision, there were simply a lot of missionaries with "selective hearing" who misinterpreted his zeal and urgency for "there are no rules, just baptize". But President Farnes, no matter how much he required results it was never at the cost of obedience or skipping repentance.

Well, I haven´t got much else to write. I´m anxious to see you all. I´m not dying, I´m not distracted. Other than these companionship problems and my feet, things aren´t that hard. I´m grateful that all of yo are having such great and spiritual experiences this week. Sorry Ella, about the fall. Just remember that "Adam fell that men might live, and men are that they might have joy"! Love you guys.

Elder Blaylock