March 28th - Rescue Work

Hello Beloved Family and Friends,

And Happy Easter! I hope that you guys all had a good time remembering our Savior´s sacrifice and also eating some chocolate and some hard-boiled eggs. I know I sure did! 

(I asked Ben if they have refugees in Brazil.)  We do have refugees here, from a country called Itche or something similar. One of the new members here is from there. They had some sort of natural disaster and had to flee. Dad and Dave sent me the song they sung. I´m looking forward to hearing it!

This week we´d hit a bit of a stand still finding people with our own efforts knocking doors, so we grabbed the ward directory and decided to go house to house, visiting the members, sharing messages about missionary work and getting some references, while hopefully doing some rescue work to help the people that aren´t coming to church. One of the less-active members here is really funny, his name is Walter Baraquet, and he´s a pretty old guy that lives in a house that´s directly off the main road, but still looks like it´s in the middle of the jungle. He loves to complain about politics, and as missionaries we can´t express our opinions about it, but we can listen and Walter loves to talk. He has a ton of really long numbers memorized, like the exact number of reals that the government received last year. He repeats the same facts every visit, but he has enough of them that I still learn something every time. A few choice quotes "Rich people don´t think like the rest of us. If I had 100 reals, I´ll spend one, because I´d still have 99, but a rich man can´t, because then he wouldn´t have 100." "This isn´t the US here son, this here is BRAZIL!" "Have you ever noticed that the government here always have new cars? But you never hear of them selling cars. Where do the old cars go?" He´s a really great guy.

This week I´ve been thinking a lot about the concept of persevere until the end. It´s one of the concepts that we teach a lot, and this week the President of the Deacon´s quorum here gave a talk about how we can persevere until the end. It´s important to remember that the principle is not make it a little bit longer, but persevere until the END. We have to have a truly eternal perspective. We´re not just trying to make it until the end of today, but until the end of this life, and the things we do now will have repercussions far into the future. With the end in mind, I will succeed.

Elder Murray