Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Week 8

hello everyone!! thank you so much for all the letters! i got them on saturday and it was great! this is the beggining of my last week in the Missionary training Center! i~m not quite so sure how i feel about it yet but i am so very excited! we leave on tuesday the 4th and then we are in the real world! this week has been absolutely amazing!!! i don't know how i~m going to write everything... but yesterday was an amazing experience! yesterday after almoço we went out and gave copies of The Book of Mormon (O Livro de Mórmon) to people! REAL people! we were so nervous when we started! but the funniest thing happened! ok so the first lady we tried to talk to really didn~t want to talk to us, but then we started talking to this man that had just walked out of a bank, and we said hi and everything and got started in portuguese, and he started speaking ENGLISH! i couldn~t figure out what he was saying for like the first 5 seconds until i realized he was speaking in english! but he said he had a coworker that is a member of the church and we gave him a book of mormon and he said he would call the missionaries to talk to him about it! the whole afternoon went amazing! each of us had 2 book, so 6 in all in our companionship (me, Elder Nielson, Elder Healy). we talked to so many people and the cool thing was that i could understand them, more or less, but it was amazing! i think we had 4ish people ask how long we had been in Brasil and they were all pretty shocked to hear that it was only 8 weeks! when i think about it i am pretty shocked too! 8 weeks! it feels like 8 days! i know that the Lord is helping us along the way and that we need him so much! we talked to a few people that were really interested in the church and about Jesus Christ because they didn~t know too much about Him. it felt amazing to share the gospel with people and get a little taste of how it will be in another week! so on monday, we go to downtown São Paulo and we get to do it all again! but it is pretty much in the heart of the city! i can~t wait!
so mom, i haven~t gotten a haircut in 9 weeks now! but don~t worry i am getting one tomorrow! my hair is driving me crazy! i would´ve done it myself but they don´t want us to do it ourselves while we are in the ctm.
the book of mormon is so amazing! i have never read through it so fast before! i am already into helaman! i have the hardest time putting it down sometimes! the scriptures that stick out to me this week are about moroni, where is says that if all men were like moroni, the powers of hell would have no power over the world. we need to follow his example, and be someone that people will talk about for years after we are gone because of how valiant we are!
the church is true! our heavenly father is always with us just waiting for us to ask for his help! Do not ever forget to pray and ask for his help! i am so very greatful for the gift of the Holy Ghost in my life! it helps me so much each and every day! thank you so much for all the prayers! I love you all so very much!
O evangelho de Jesus Cristo pode ajudar nossas vidas! eu sei que Jesus Cristo vive!
Amor
Elder Knudson

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Week 7!

Óla!
how is everyone doing? this week went by SO fast!!! there has been so much happening and so many lessons to learn and to teach that it is so hard to differentiate... but today we went to the temple again! the temple is so amazing and such a blessing for us to have in our lives! but after we got back we went to this bbq place called churrascaria, it is one of those places they walk around with the meat on the sticks and you can eat as much as you want, it was so good! i even got brave and tried a chicken heart! it was suprisingly good! the other weird thing they had there was a fried banana, it was pretty awesome too! hopefully everywhere isn~t like that because if it is i may end up gaining some weight!

so last tuesday we had a devocional and the speaker was talking about faith, and one of his main points was that faith works through words. he gave many examples in the scriptures of people that showed their faith through there words but i can~t remember them at the moment. but he said that satan tries to make us nervous or embarassed so that we don~t open our mouth, because that is how people recieve the gospel, by someone opening their mouth to share. and satan knows this, he knows that the message that we have as Latter-day Saints can help people happiness and he will do anything he can to make it so we wont open our mouths and share this wonderful message to those around us. do not be afraid to open you mouth! everyone needs to hear about the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, and we have the power to give them that chance.

the other thing that i learned this week is just how much we have to learn in life! here in the CTM it is very easy to see, because there is always so much for you to be learning all the time! so when i feel like i have learned one thing, almost immidiately another thing appears for me to begin working on to help me progress as a misionary. but this is something that has been happening forever, and it is always happening, we just don~t always seek out the lesson that we are supposed to be learning from the situation we are in. but because God loves us, He will keep giving us things to help us grow, even when we don~t realize it.
so the mail takes forever to get here! but i did get my first letter being here in the CTM, from Adria, it was nice to see that the world is still moving! sometimes it is hard to see when all you see are the same rooms weeks at a time. but it was a surprise to get the letter though, because a few days earlier we heard that the Brasilian postal service went on strike, but it was either a rumor or a very short strike because i got a letter a few days later.

i love you! the Lord has a work for all of us to do, the hard part is figuring out what we need to be doing to accomplish the things the Lord wants us to do. that is why it is so important to rely on the Spirit in our lives, and another thing that we are given to help is prayer! Heavenly Father hears our prays and he will answer them! i know that our Heavenly Father loves us and is always trying to help us progress and grow!
i love you all!
Elder Knudson

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

SIGMA 6


hello again! this week seems to have flown by so fast i hardly remember what happened! well Brasil is pretty amazing! i was pretty nervous at first but being here is so much fun! the brasillian missionaries that come in are some of the neatest people! they love to come and test out their english with us american misionaries! but i am working hard to try and talk to them more in portuguese, i am slowly progressing with the language. it is still hard and it is so much hard work, but today we were in the temole and i heard some elders that had been out for 13 or so months and they sounded awesome! i can~t wait ttill i can speak like a native! so here at th CTM there are about 250 or so missionaries and maybe 30 or 40 of them are american... the visas are so backed up right now its insane... please pray for those elders still waiting for their visas.
so on p-day here we get to walk around the town and buy stuff, go to the post office to send letters and just be in the town! it is so much fun, but it is pretty comical how i don~t know anything that is going on around me because everyone is talking in portuguese!
this week i started Alma and i was readying through chapter 32 i think sat (idk, that days are all mushed together) but it is an amazing chapter about faith! my teachers here are amazing! Irmão Israel and Irmã Cordoso, but yesterday was Irmã Cordoso~s last day here so tomorrow we will have a new teacher. so as of today, i have 3 weeks till i finish here at the CTM! CRAZY!!!!! the weeks are flying by so fast! so we teach fake investigators throughout the week to practice teaching the lessons and to help our protuguese, but on saturdays they bring in members from local wards and they volunteer to be ´´Investigator´´ its pretty fun! one time we were teaching a family of 5 and they had a little girl who was probably 8 i think, but it was hillarious because every once in a while she would correct our portuguese! hahaha! and i could tell she was trying not to laugh the whole time while we were teaching cause i~m sure we sounded super funny! imagine persons try to teach you and sound like should be preshcool (or like that) but i think we are getting better with the grammer and our sentance stucture! it is so neat to hear someone talk and understand what they are saying!! the Lord is blessing us immensly! there is no way this work would progress without him!
i am running out of stories to tell because everyday is so similar to the last right now, but it will get better when i am out in the field! the one bad thing about being here is that they don~t want us to take our cameras out of the CTM, not even when we go to the temple... but i guess they do that so the people around here don~t think that missionaries are here to be tourists, cause the people around here see a lot of missiionaries!
well my time is almost up for email... i can~t print here so i have to read the emails i have first and then write, but thats ok.
i love you all so much! the church is true! Joseph Smith truely was called of God to restore this church! please do not hesitate to share this great blessing with anyone that you come into contact with!
Love,
Elder Knudson!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Elder Knudson's semana 5

Óla minha Família!!!
I AM IN BRASIL!!!!!! so the plane ride here pretty much was the worst thing in my life... the ride to texas was good! i didnt have anyone sitting by me and i was by the window, so it was very comfortable and i had a lot of room! but the plane to São Paulo was not fun at all! we left tx at 740p and got to São Paulo at 740a, so with the time difference it was like a 10 hour flight. but i was in the middle of the plane and was between 2 people, and i couldn~t get comfortable... so i got maybe and hour of sleep, it was so boring! but i am here now and i am loving it! so much has happened this week that i don~t know where to start... the MTC here is a lot smaller than in Provo, there is around 150 missionaries here and about 2700 in Provo, so pretty big difference! but other than that, a lot of the things are the same, all the classes are the same way, we learn the same lessons here that we would in ut, but the cool thing here is that everything is in portuguese! all the signs and all you pretty much here is portuguese, so most of the time i don~t know what is going on bc i don~t know very much portuguese to understand any of it! but i am so excited to be here! the city is HUGE!
we went to the temple today! it was deffinately the highlight of the week! right when i walked in the doors the spirit was so strong, and i could hardly hold back the tears. the temple is such a wonderful blessing in our lives!
ok so the mail here is secure, they said that you don~t need to put stickers or anything on them, but they stress putting the right address on the envelope! they talked to us for like 5 minutes, just about why its important to put evereything on the address.
so my address for the next 4 weeks is,

Elder Braden Jeffrey Knudson
Box #16 District 31-A Brazil MTC
Brazil São Paulo Interlagos Mission
Rua Padre Antônio D´Angelo, 121
Casa Verde, São Paulo, SP
Brazil 02516-040

it takes about 2 weeks for a letter to get here so in about 2 weeks start sending letters to my mission home, the address is in my mission packet. also, if you want to send packages, send them to the mission home as well, not to the MTC here.

the portuguese is coming, slowly but surely! it feels like an aweful small bit that i know when i go out and i still can~t even pick up more than 6 or 7 words in a sentance that someone says to me, they talk so fast here!!! but i was told that in 5 or 6 months i will be able to say pretty much anything that i want and be able to understand pretty much everything. that makes me happy to think about that! i can~t wait to be fluent! and be ready for an accent when i come home! yeah i know, thats still a long way out!

well i~ve ran out of thought....
i love you all so very much! thank you for all the prayers!
Elder Knudson