My Birthday!!!

November 25, 2024

Thank you to everyone who reached out this week. I love reading updates from everyone and the pictures are always fun to look at. I will try to respond to as many of you as I can, but I won't be able to respond to everyone.

This week was awesome. It was a little hotter because it didn't rain as much and there weren't as many clouds. We did still get drenched in rain at least once this week though. One day we were eating lunch with a member and they said that I looked like a young Lionel Messi. I honestly thought I would get told I looked like someone from the US or Canada and not like someone from South America. On Thursday we had a Mission Tour. It is basically a 4-hour meeting with half of our mission and a Church leader. Of course, he was from Brasil, so I didn't understand much during the meeting, but the mission president's wife did speak to us in English because she doesn't know a lot of Portuguese, so I understood that part. I also got to see my buddies from the MTC that are serving in Goiânia. Luckily, they were part of the same half of the mission that I was with, so we got to talk about our experiences so far.

Friday was my birthday, and we did exchanges with the Zone Leaders that day, so it was pretty awesome. Both of the Zone Leaders are Americans so we spoke a lot of English so I could understand them. I went with Elder Taylor to their area, and it is a little more sketchy than ours. We thought we were going to get mugged at one point because we were sitting on the curb trying to figure where to go next and this guy pulled up right next to us and was staring at Elder Taylor's phone. Thankfully he was an old member of the church who hasn't been to church in more than 20 years, and he just wanted to give us his phone number so they could visit him later. That was about the only successful thing that happened during the exchange. The rest was just trying to visit people and nobody was home. That night we met back up with Elder Marvel and Elder White and went to dinner to celebrate my birthday. We also had a recent convert and investigator with us.

The next day I got to try another new food. I got chicken throat at a member's house. This has about as much meat on it as it sounds like it does. It also has many bones that got in the way of the meat. It tasted just like any other part of a chicken though, so it wasn't bad. We finally got someone to go to church with us, but only one person. Many people keep on telling us they will, and we remind them the night before, but they are never there. It was so great to actually have someone there for once.

My spiritual thought this week is another scripture I shared during one of the member meals. My journal I write in every night has a scripture at the bottom of each page and the scripture was the same one that I shared earlier that day. It is John 3:16. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." This scripture has helped encourage me and know that I can sacrifice 2 years of my life to God, because he sacrificed way more for me. It also means that He knows and can help us make it through anything because he sacrificed and suffered through much more than we will ever experience in this life. If you have any questions or just want to talk you can email me at benson.plaster@missionary.org.

Tchau, Elder Plaster