Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!‏

5/02/15

That is about how I felt this week :P This was my first week alone taking care of the office. It was super hard. Well actually the first day wasn’t too hard but the second was really stressful.  It was when all of the new missionaries got here and when all the old missionaries were leaving! That was a really strange day. I was running around making copies of all the documents of the new missionaries and doing all the stuff to renew their visas. It was really difficult and then at 5 o´clock i had to go and take all the missionaries leaving to the airport!!!!!!!! That was pretty trunky ;P   The only crazy thing was that when we got there, a problem came up and it looked like the Americans would have to only take 23 kilos instead of 63 kilos. That was a scare! I started to panic a little and I called São Paulo to try and get it all figured out and then in the end one of the workers turned out to be a member and allowed all the Americans to take all their baggage.  But it was really stressful. But this week was more about adapting to life alone in the office. 

The other day we had to use the skype because the firewall on one of the computers wasn’t working so we had to call Salt Lake and then they turned on the firewall but also turned on a safe guard that encrypted all of the files on the computer and made it so that we couldn’t log on.  We waited like the whole week to get all that worked out and finally we had to use skype so that the techs could see the computer screen. What is cool is this thing called team viewer that lets others control your computer. It was interesting. 

But this week doing everything was super stressful but I learned something. Dad sent me an email about the iron rod and how we need to hold on to it and we know that the iron rod is the word of god, so as we were teaching I was thinking that really that is what we need.  We all need to STUDY the scriptures every day. 

There is something cool in the Portuguese translation of the Book of Mormon. in 1 Nephi 8:24 , 30 it talks about the people that we going to the tree of life and it talks about 3 different ways the people gripped the rod, there are those who segurar (hold), those who are apegados (clinging), and those who agarravam-se (caught hold). As we read we see those who just held the rod got the tree but they fell away and the same thing happened to those who were just clinging to the rod but those who caught hold of the rod continued until the tree of life and never left it. It shows us that we cannot just read the Book of Mormon or that we can be content with just understanding the same things over and over again, but that we must study the Book of Mormon! This is a test for eternal life and we have all the guide books we need but we will never get a good grade if we just read the guide books but we have to study them so that we come out victorious from this test. It was just something that I learned this past week and I thought was interesting and wanted to share it with you guys :)

I love you guys so much! I know that families can be eternal, if we endure till the end. I know that the Book of Mormon blesses our life.  The way we learn to study the Book of Mormon we will come to learn more about Christ and as we come to learn more about Him we will come to know Him. 

Love, Elder Pachner