Jan 1, 2008

My christmas and new years letters are in the mail so i will talk mainly about other things that have been going on. I'll start by talking about meeting my mission president. President Teixeira (tashaida), The pronunciation doent make sense in English but that is the way it is. He is from portugal so i couldn't understand his portugese at first. I cought on fairly quickly, They pronounce 's' like 'sh'. Sister Teixeira spoke first on the vision of the tree of life and of how it applies to missionary work, then President Teixeira spoke on goals. He gave the example of president kenedy saying we would go to the moon by 1970 and saying that it was a goal that streched the abiliy of the nation. He really got into it, he speaks with his entire body. He spoke of how we should set gaols that stretch us. He spoke in English, and had no accent what so ever. He speaks 6 languages. Afterward I spoke with his son who was visiting for christmas, he served his mission in Japan and knew Alex Fulbright. I also spoke to president Teixeira and he gave me so good advise. His first peice of advise that was kind of counter intuitive was to learn the language we should spend most of our time learning the gospel. The language will come. The gospel and a testimony dont come as easily. Also his wife in her talk gave a challenge to all of the missionaries to read the book of mormon in the next 60 days, the same as it took to translate it. So i set the goal of reading the entire book of mormon in the 2 weeks i have left in the CTM. I am still continuing my personal study as normal, I am reading the Book of Mormon in every spare minute i have. I didn't think that i had any free time, but i do have more than i thought. Just yesterday I read 150 pages, I read all of the Book of mormon up to mosiah. I was averaging about a page every 2 minutes. That means I spent 5 hours reading the book of mormon. Some of the time was ment for that but others i was scraping together. Like i got one hour from a half hour of lunch break and a half hour of dinner hour, I got 2 hours from regular study time, and 1 hours from the bonus study time we got after the large group meeting yesterday, and an hour of time that i would have spent talking. At that rate i will be done before week is out. Maybe not we probably wont have an extra hour of study time any day soon. I have been working on reading the book of mormon in portuges also. It is not comming at a page every 2 minutes. More like 10 minutes a page. But I am chugging along. I am on chapter 13 of first Nephi.
> I have this in my letter from Christmas but i will say it again here. when we went prosyliting the friday before Christmas I met a fire fighter that was over seeing the constuction of a stage for a concert. They needed fire fighters because they were going to be firing off fireworks form the stage. He was a return missionary, He served in Belém, He said served with a Benjamin Risenmay, I told him that Benjamin was my cousin because that is the only distant relation I know. Who is he? How am i related to him? Benjamin Risenmay also came up when I spoke to the Speaker for the large group meeting that came up to me before hand and asked if I knew Benjamin Risenmay, I said he was my second cousin, I figured I was fairly safe saying that given the number of siblings that Grandpa Risenmay had. He had been his mission president. I think the speakers name was Andrews though I could be mistaken. He is now serving a mission as an auditor trainer. I need to get off now because my time is up.
Good bye for now.
Elder Reed Risenmay