There is Sunshine in my Soul AND my Matosinhos today!!!!

Olá Lindas Pessoas!

Porto

Guys. What a strange and fantastic week. WHERE DO I BEGIN?! How about with one of the highlights? IT´S SUNNY OUTSIDE. THERE. IS. SUNSHINE. IN. MATOSINHOS. Do you know what this means?!?! This week, I went outside WITHOUT tights for the first time since October. Yep. Life is good. 

Porto

Other than superb weather, what else happened this week...Well, for starters, we somehow ended up a little low on investigators this week (they all got baptized...best problem to have my friends) so we did a LOT of contacts. We started taking advantage of any opportunity to speak to anybody, which includes knocking doors of any building possible. Door knocking in Portugal...let´s just say it´s not something I´ve ever done before to be perfectly honest! Usually just talking to people on the street works just great but door knocking turned out to be pretty cool though and we found some neat people. It´s also really funny. My favorite is when people having music on and they´re singing along and then they still pretend not to be home. One thing that surprised me about the mission is how easy it can be to take rejection...most people in Portugal are really nice and even when they´re not interested they´ll tell you just that and I only get yelled at a few times a day. You´d think that would be sad but usually I just come up with reasons why they´re having a bad day, (cat died, cousin moved away, and other creative responses) or we just laugh and keep going. Even on days where it seems like NOBODY wants to talk to us, even just finding one really cool person makes it all worth it. I guess I just have Heavenly Father to thank for that, He just keeps us going and reminding us that it´s about the individual.

Soooo not gonna lie, I was like way mega-depressed to see Sister Brundage go. We became amazing friends and I think it´s the closest I have ever been to know what it´s like to have a sister, which was very cool for me. She is now off to Madeira, but I hope to see her again sometime on the mission. CAN YOU BELIEVE I´M HITTING MY HALFWAY MARK THIS MONTH?!?!?! Me neither. Good news is, Sister Giberson is fantastic and I´m not just saying that. I guess I don´t really talk about my comps very much with you guys but now you can know that I LOVE SISTER BRUNDAGE AND SISTER GIBERSON. Sister Giberson is a super hard worker, speaks awesome Portuguese and a lot of it, and we teach together really easily. It´s always interesting to start teaching with someone new because every has their own style and sometimes it can be awkward, but with her it´s all just synching really nicely! Maybe it´s because she was trained by Sister Prieto and I also worked with her a bit, who knows! I´m just grateful!!!

Miracle of the week...so every week we keep track of people that have committed to go to church so we can follow up, help them get their and so on. Our district leader tells our zone leaders about it and whatnot so they can keep tabs on it all too. Well......by Saturday we had nobody. THEN, Saturday night we got a family of 4 to commit to go but our district leader forgot to tell our zone leaders so they all thought we had nobody going. And, by Sunday morning so did we because when we passed by this family they decided not to go. So we went to church thinking...okay, we´ll see what happens! Want to know what happened? A miracle. We get there and a member´s friend is their with her, then her boyfriend showed up, then 2 of our most promising investigators suprised us and came, then a contact that I did in the street two or three weeks ago showed up, then a less active that we had just started making plans to visit walked in with her boyfriend and friend. In short, we ended up having 7 people at church!!!!! When our district leader talked to our zone leader...let´s just say everybody was surprised, confused, and VERY happy. Heavenly Father continues to bless and care for my dear Matosinhos. There is nowhere else that I would rather be for 6 months of my mission, not that I know a lot of areas but still...it´s full of miracles and it´s really my home. Sometimes I think, wow it´s be cool to see Lisboa or the islands and such, and it would be! But when transfers roll around, or even just a Sunday with all the members, there is nowhere else I´d rather be but RIGHT here.

I love you all, I´m runnning out of time, but I´ll be praying for you!!!

Sister Swasey