Love This Area!

I realized today is my dogs b-day, haha! How old is he? I don’t remember. ANYWAY, this week has been fantastic! Time is just flying by here in Setubal. I am LOVING it here, I don’t EVER wanna leave! These people are like a huge blessing to me I love it! We are always busy with lessons too, and we get fed so much lately its insane! We have been fed TEN times in the last TEN days!!! What? Its nuts! Way cool tho! I have come to LOVE rice! haha! Its weird, I have come to love some things here that I didn’t love quite as much before. Like onions, I know weird, but I love onions. Okay, okay, enough pointless talk.

SO our baptism on Saturday went great! The water was cold tho! We had a problem with the font. But the kid was a champ about it. It was cold, but everything went as planned and just great! It was awesome to see another baptism here! We have a few more people that are "potentials" that are probably headed right in that direction. We found this new investigator named Odete. She is incredible! She is pretty much already ready to be dunked and we have only taught her two times! She came to the baptism, then the next day came to church and cried and cried. She just LOVED it. And every time we talk with her she is just ALL smiles and LOVES everything we teach! It’s incredible! So I really hope within the next 2 weeks or so we can mark a date for her! She is 51. She is really awesome. I love teaching her.

We had this lesson with a less active member, and we were talking about the after life and how we will all have perfect bodies again, and she at first was like I don’t want my body back...(cuz she is really big), haha. We were talking about the spirit world and stuff and she said, “but I have a fat spirit too.” haha! It was just hilarious. She is really funny.

So one of those 10 dinner/lunch appointments we had was with Helio and Sonia. They are incredible! Helio is a recent convert just waiting patiently for the time to pass to where he can take his family to the temple. It’s awesome! They fed us, then after Sonia grabbed this big bag and just chucked SO much food in it! So we didn’t even have to do our shopping this week. All we had to get was Mayo. Awesome! Oh, then he drove us home and stopped by a store and bought us this amazing Portuguese bread and TONS of juice! They are so, so nice! I am in the process of writing them a thank you letter.

My new companion is going to be Elder Davis. I have heard really good things. AND MOST OF ALL....I hear he is a CLEAN person!!!! YAYAYAAYAYAYAY! What a relief! Ahhhh! I am way stoked. I hear that he is funny and just a cool kid. He is from Florida. YAY an American! Haha. I am already about out of time...Goodness! But I love you all! And most of all I love this work and I love this church! And I know that it is true! And I’m very lucky to be apart of this wonderful work to bring souls unto Christ!!I LOVE YOU!
Love Elder Gray

Fastest Week of my Mission

I am pretty sure I just had the FASTEST week of my mission. I can’t believe its Wednesday already. I think I said that last week too, but this week is even more so! I can’t believe it! But its just cuz stuff is going so well right now! We had those 3 baptisms. They were incredible. Everything went just PERFECT! And the brothers are all just doing great! We went and saw them yesterday and it was fantastic! The middle age one that at first was kind of the one falling behind, well now he is the one just eating up everything we give him! I love it! At the end of the lesson we say, “so is there anything we can do for you guys?” And he says “YES,” so we are like ok, “what’s up?”...and he says, “come back!” We say, “yep of course...when?” He says, “Sempre!!” Haha, it was awesome, I loved it! Then we went to a dinner appt. that went really well. We have had a dinner appt. every day so far!!

We had lunch on Sunday, then dinner on Monday, dinner again on Tuesday, we have dinner again tonight, tomorrow we have appointments for lunch AND dinner! It’s just crazy! I think we have one on Friday too but I’m not sure exactly. Its crazy, it’s almost like I’m in the states!
Oh yeah, and at the baptism I gave a talk on the Holy Ghost, and it was really good, went really well. Okay kind of, it was hard, but it went alright. Oh, AND we have another baptism this week! On Saturday again, this kid named Wilson. He is progressing a bit slower then we’d like but at least he is ready and going for it. We for sure have to keep going and helping him. It’s really awesome though.

This ward is just fantastic! I could stay here the rest of my mission!! I guarantee there is no better area than this one here in the Lisbon mission. I love it here. I will be getting a new companion here next week. I hope it will be someone way cool! And someone CLEAN for goodness sakes!

So on Sunday and Monday, we met with this family, Familia Santos. They are the COOLEST family! They are way normal and just fun! AND when we ate with them.....They had ICE! Whoa!!! ICE, what? No way! OH yes I ate it up! I had probably like 25 pieces of ice, haha!! It was amazing. Another one of those “Little Things” that you just don’t realize how good it is till it’s GONZO for 2 years! Like Free Refills! Goodness don’t you guys take that for granted! It will be nice to have that back someday....haha!

So church this week was really great. Spiritual as normal, and it was fast and testimony meeting and there were a lot of talks about the plan of salvation because of the boy that died. It was tough, but very spiritual. That is what I got out of it. I’m still having a hard time understanding this Portuguese stuff. What is Portuguese rated on the hardness to learn scale? Its GOTTA be pretty far up there, right under learning a new alphabet or something. J Jenn, Scotty, tell little Gracee happy big number 2 for me haha!! I expect PICS soon. (Again) :) Thank you all for everything! I LOVE YOU ALL!!!!
LOVE ELDER GRAY!