August 27, 2014

Hi!

Tomorrow will be one year since I left on my mission!

This week was really cool, President decided last Thursday that he wanted to have a mission conference yesterday... so we had to get everything set up to do that!  But it turned out being a really incredible experience.  It was basically an all day ordeal, haha.  It started at 3 and was supposed to end at 7 but ended up going until about 8, haha.  The counselors gave talks there, which was really good, it was honestly the first time I had ever seen one of them and the first time I had seen either of them doing anything as mission counselor, but they're super spiritual, and their talks yesterday really showed the missionaries that.  I really hope President starts to do more stuff with them!  We also did some cool stuff like try to take a picture of the whole mission (but that didn't work out, lol) and we filmed the whole mission singing the mission's anthem.  

I don't think I've told you guys about the anthem yet.  São Paulo Sul is the oldest existing mission in Brazil and has a ton of history, and we found some really cool history files and stuff on the computers, including an anthem that some super awesome Elder made and got a choir of missionaries to sing!  It's actually really good and now at all of the big meetings of the mission we sing it!

The real purpose of this conference was to establish a baptismal goal for the mission, we're going to have 410 baptisms before the end of the year!  So the whole conference was about exciting and elevating the missionaries and re-establishing focus on real success in bringing people to Christ. For this conference we did some pretty sweet stuff to really excite everyone, everyone got these really cool printed and laminated cards with a photo of Christ on one side and some quotes and goals and a new motto of the mission on the other. Also, the new assistant used to work doing film editing and photo editing and 3d modeling and music production and basically anything in that realm you could imagine.  He made some really stinking cool videos to help with this conference.

I uploaded the files of some of the videos and the card on my google drive, and soon I'll put up the videos of the mission anthem and the mission singing the anthem! My favorite of the videos is the "meta da missão" (goal of the mission) which was made to announce the goal.  I think it is really well done!  There are a couple of simply miraculously timed pictures that go well with the music that is playing, check out the parts where they sing "when I am down" and then the first time they sing "you raise me up"  It literally makes me so happy, haha!  And crazy enough, Elder Hernandes says that it was totally on accident!

So this week was really busy but it all payed off because the conference was awesome!   And President and Sister said that today is mandatory pday for us!

We're about to leave to see some of the city, but I'll write more later!