Marsh Mission Moments: Elder Atunes

Missionary Slumber Party

We had a cool week with a mission tour on Wednesday. The whole mission participated, so on Tuesday night our house had 8 missionaries who had traveled to Belo Horizonte for the tour. We only have 2 beds in our house so 6 missionaries had to sleep on the tile floor for a night. haha I don’t think missionaries really mind.

We learned about a new way of doing contacts with Elder Antunes. It’s like this: "Hi, we're representatives of Jesus Christ and we are here searching for God's elect children. We'd like to go to your home now to say a prayer and bless your family." I like it…It’s simple and powerful. What’s different is we don’t say anything about a church because that usually chases away people. In Brazil there are 2 or 3 different churches on every street, so people get tired of hearing about churches, but everyone here loves God and prayer!

Marcia was baptized on Saturday! She’s the mom of the less active girls that a member brought back to church. She’s one of the most firm baptisms that I’ve had yet. She could hardly wait to be baptized and was so happy afterwards. When she got the gift of the Holy Ghost she said she felt a heat start from her feet and then rise up to her chest...cool stuff.

Marcia's Baptism

The zone was super blessed too. Saturday morning our zone of 18 missionaries only had 1 baptism planned for the weekend, so Elder Bravo and I called every companionship and told them, "Red Alert! There are God’s children waiting to be saved in our zone, and we just have to find them!" We made a new rule for the day that every lesson and street contact had to have a baptismal invitation. At 4 o’clock we got a call that the Elders had found a family of 4 who was just waiting to baptized. They were baptized 3 hours later! It’s so fun to watch the Lord’s work happen.

I love the work.

Elder Marsh

PS That was such a funny analogy that Chris gave in his talk. Elder Bravo and I laughed a lot. I love the story of Lori. Missionary work is so good.