"Have fun storming the castle!”

Oi pessoal! I will first explain the title. Because we are crazy young adults we decided after our morning naps that we wanted to go to a castle that is an hour away. So we cleaned our house, did our shopping, ate lunch, and now, at noon, we are on our way! We are going to try to be fast, but this activity is not going to leave us much time at the end of the day, but it's gonna be worth it!! Thus the title. We are gonna storm this castle.

This week was a crazy busy week! On Wednesday and thuesday we had appointments all day on all ends of Barreiro and we had exchanges with he STLs on Tuesday until Wednesday. So those days were highly stressful, and then on Friday we had conference of the zone! Oh gosh. Zone conference. We had zone conference. English is hard. It was awesome! We learned how to do a plan of salvation lesson in 4 minutes for when people don't have a lot of time to talk to us. The trick is that the thing that is most important is to bring the spirit, and you can't do that if you are talking as fast as you can trying to fit all the doctrine in, so we learned how to choose all the most important points and use those to frame the atonement because that is the most powerful part. And when we are not spending a ton of time on the other parts we can take our time and bear our testimonies when we talk about the atonement. It is really cool. (we also learned a way to teach it in like 1 minute and I was like "when would I ever used this" and then I used it that night when we were teaching the first lesson and then she asked what our purpose on earth was, and we were all ready out of time so I taught the 1 minute version and set up a return appointment to better answer her question, it was really cool.) we also learned all about the area book app. Due to the laws in Europe we can't put any one into the app if we haven't first given them a privacy notice. We can send it as an email or give it to people in person. Also we have a deadline to get as many of our existing records in as possible and then we have to destroy all of them. President gave us one hour a day to work on this project and a project it is. We have been going through our area books trying to call everyone to see if they still have interest. A lot of numbers don't work anymore or are blocked and so our apartment is full of piles of records of people who we are going to stop by or try calling again, and saddest of all, a pile of records we have to destroy because they aren't interested or we have no way to contact them. We have about a month to finish this project, (personally I find it really fun to go through and read all the records and call people!) we have also already had several very successful applintments with people who investigated in the past and are still interested, so that has been really cool too! 

Our week, though busy, was very successful in terms of appointments, we taught a lot and well. This week also taught me a lot of things that I really need to work on and improve with my teaching. I have gotten to a point where I am pretty comfortable teaching the doctrine and answering questions, but what I really need to improve is teaching to peoples needs. I have also been fighting a headache for a few weeks which led to some grumpiness which led to me being a little blunt with some of our friends. It ended up working out and they made and kept the commitments we offered, but that is not the kind of missionary I want to be. I am so grateful for the opportunity we have to always learn and improve. God is so patient with us.

It was a wonderful week, and we are working with some cool people, please keep the people of Portugal in your prayers!

Love

Sister Hardy 

And some photos!