April 10, 2012

Ola minha familia,

First off HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!!! Wow can you believe it another year has come and gone in the blink of an eye... It's so crazy. It has now officially been two years to the day that I went through the temple for the first time. And it's been two years since our L.A trip dad :) So much fun! I love you Dad and everyone :)

So this week was a great week. :) Elder Wright and I had the opportunity to give a training in our zone meeting this week. We gave the training on being ourselves while being a missionary. It was a really fun training to give because a lot of missionaries kind of loose themselves so much that they become robots. And if God wanted any arm of Robots he'd do it ha ha. So we talked a lot about how you act more like yourself when you really genuinely care about the people you are teaching and people can feel the difference. And we talked about being exactly obedient and what the really means. I thought of an analogy to explain the point. When you have an expert marksman with a sniper, what makes him an expert is the fact that his is consistant. He doesn't hit the EXACT same spot every single time. But he does hit within the same limits almost every single time. He may have one or 2 barely outside of his goal but more than majority are inside and that is how we are to be as missionaries and members. I really enjoyed giving the training because I felt like I could use a lot of the knowledge I have learned on my mission to help the younger missionaries.
Also this week we taught Eliezer and Simone. They are progressing really well. We have a lot of fun teaching them English and the Gospel. We had a great lesson Sunday night with them where we talked about Christ and his Atonement. We also talked about baptism and set a date for April 29th. We teach them all in Portuguese so I get to use it quite a bit with them which is a blast. This is the first Brazilian family i've taught on my mission that has progressed past the first lesson and accepted a date :) I'm super stoked. The problem we are looking at right now is the fact that summer is coming and his hours for work are going to get more hectic. So coming to church could be a problem. :( But we have faith.!
We had interviews this week as well and I had my first interview with President in 6 months ha ha last time we had interviews he didn't have time for me so we just kind of didn't have one ha ha but this interview was great. He gave me some good "ending" advice so everything is going well... Thank you to all for my birthday letters and pkgs. I love you all so much and I had a great birthday. Just normal day but still a great one :) Thank you and I love you all

Elder Jonny Burton