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Carnival

Barco again

Roberto is awesome

Hola!

This week was amazing! SOOO amazing! First off i want to thank my mom for sending packages! I FINALLY got them :) i would say it was a valentines day gift! And then also i got some letters from Becca and Kyleigh! Thank you SO much! My teammates a great i hope they read this some how. I dont have thier emails but i finally got the letter you all sent in novemeber i think. Thank you! And also another letter from a friend from school! James Bahiti. Thank you! and also the Hutchinsons! thank you so much. Nice to get handwritten letters ;)

But that wasnt the only reason this week was amazing... Stenio got baptized! YESSSSSS: finally. So the story on stenio begins when he shows up at church because a friend invited him and he said he wanted to change his life. Wow. The Lord had really been preparing him. I think i mentioned stenio last week a little bit. he is super solid. So funny and goofy. But this is what happened this week... So we go to Sao Vicente for a zone conference and cant meet with him for two days. But we call him on the phone and follow up a little bit for the 2-3 days we were out of town. He said all is good. But he finally called his mom who lives in Praia i think and she said he cant get baptized... Well stenio is 19 so it is totally up to him. But his mom was really against it. She said he was already baptized into the catholic church when he was a baby and it would be disrespectful for his family that helped with all that when he was born. I didnt really get the whole story but needless to say Stenio was basically crying on the phone when he told us. And that kind of took away the excitement he had about being baptized. So we finally make it back to Santo Antao.. which is another story...  but anyway we make it back and meet Stenio at the caixe (where the boats are) to have him meet our district leader and have his interview. Well stenio shows up super late because he slept in so they didnt have time for the interview. So we had to do it on skype later that day. Well skype decided not to work... but dont worry.. a lot of prayers and finally it worked. Then all was good. Only thing is stenio really needed to decide what he was going to do. So he had all these tests for school so we couldnt meet with him until a day before baptism. And that lesson was really important. The spirit was really strong too. We invited Stenio to pray that night and really think about his decision tomorrow so that he could feel prepared. 

The next day he told us he woke up feeling so much better about baptism and excited again. And his baptism was amazing! He bore his testimony after and i could feel how much it meant to him to have everything in the past just washed away. Like a burden he didnt even realize he had was just gone. Well that isnt the best part even.. the next day when he recieved the gift of the holy ghost the blessing after was incredible! We had been talking about a mission for stenio and asked him to think about it. Well in the blessing it said something a long the lines of "When you serve a mission... " I just got a huge smile on my face after that. and then the blessing continued and said that he will have an eternal family and be a great leader in the church. I was beaming! That is what it is all about. Of course stenio still needs to work and grow and learn. But baptism is the door.. There is a path after that of enduring to the end and it is so great to see that the people who are baptized are then continuing on that path and not stopping. Endure to the temple :) i like to say :) It is great to give this vision to our investigators. 

So that is stenio! Incredible. 

Next we had zone conference the beginning of last week. I just want to say a few things i learned in that. Incredbile... We talked about the Plan of Salvation. I learned a lot. One thing i want to share is about our potenital as children of god! So we talked about the plan god presented when we were in the pre-mortal life! And how satan wanted to make sure we all got back to god and wanted to take away agency. The thing about that plan is.. we didnt only want to return and live with god again... the plan was for us to return and BE like him. We can really become like our heavenly father. Think about that. It is incredible. We can be as he is and live as he lives. That is why it is essential to live on this earth and have our agency so that we can choose to follow the laws given to us and grow, GROW, and become like our savior :) I just love that! We are here to learn and progress. Never stop progressing. Continue to learn and grow and study. The oil in our lamps is the things we know. :) And also! It is all possible because of our savior Jesus Christ. He lived a perfect life and atoned for our sins so that we could learn and grow and someday return to live with our Heavenly father. There is so much i need to learn about the Atonement but know that i know my Savior Lives. He was our savior before this life, he is our savior now, and he will continue to be our savior after this life, beckoning to us to join him in the kingdom of our father!

Love

Sister Johnson