January 2, 2017 Happy New Year and a New Assignment - Transferred to Pajuçara

So this week went by super-fast, but it was a good week. 

This week we worked I think only 2 days in our area because I was traveling a lot doing interviews and going to conferences. Tuesday, we went to a conference for trainers and trainees. It my last conference with my "son" he is already leaving training, it went by so fast these transfers. On Wednesday we taught some investigators that had the possibility to be baptized and one of them was Adriano. His problem was that he would also pray to get an answer, something that I taught my district is that when we keep asking our investigators to pray to get an answer, sometimes they get confused because 90% of the time they already have an answer. This was the case with Adriano, he already received an answer and we knew it, but I knew asking him to pray again to receive an answer that he had already received probably wouldn’t help, so we finally talked to him and told him that what he needed to focus on was praying to help him recognize his answer. I thought how interesting it was that one little thing makes the difference, rather than asking to receive an answer that we have already received sometimes we need to pray to recognize it. So he did that and we followed up with him. He explained that he wanted an answer clear and obvious, so we prayed with him and invited him to continue to pray. On Thursday we left our area again and I did some baptismal interviews in another city. 

The story of this girl that we baptized is that she prayed to know if baptism is what she needed, and she randomly uttered after the name "John Baptist" and she didn’t even know who that was! she recognize the name, but she didn’t know so she went on the internet and discovered that John the Baptist was the man who baptized Jesus. She was baptized on Saturday with Adriano. 

So on Friday we returned to our area and invited the zone leaders to interview our investigator Adriano, and he still didn’t recognize his answer until he was returning from school on Friday and he found a pamphlet in the street that was the baptism of Jesus Christ. When he got home, we arrive at his house with the zone leaders ready to interview him and he said he recognized his answer, so we interviewed him, and everything was all good. HE then showed us the pamphlet and what I realized was that it was a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet, I leaned over and whispered to my companion "hey this is JW" which is Jehovah’s Witness and my comp almost laughed and then we told Adriano that it was an answer from God. And on Saturday he was baptized. 

So this week was a crazy but a good week. Yesterday was new years and we ate dinner with the bishop´s house and then we received the transfer.

So my companion will be staying, and I’ll be going to Pajuçara which is close to Maceió, it’s on the beach I think. I will continue as district leader there.

I think it will be a good experience, I’m sad to leave this zone, this month we baptized in the zone a lot and the last time that we baptized near as many was like in 2013 so we were super happy about that. 

The good news is that my package arrived. The bad news is that I have to go get it and it’s going to be a little expensive, because it got sent to another place, but it’s all good.

Thanks for skyping with me last week, I enjoyed it too. 

Happy new years!

Love Elder Toma