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