Elder Benjamin S. Smith

On Tuesday we traveled to the Rio North mission to do some immigration paperwork and we saw the Christ Redeemer Statue! It was from far away, but it was fun. Portuguese is becoming much more natural now and the work is going well. The past couple of weeks we've talked to a lot of people who are interested in learning more about the Book of Mormon for all sorts of different reasons. Everything from looking for more peace to general curiosity, even a professor of religion who is looking to improve the accuracy of what is taught in his class.  The number of people we get to talk to in Brasil despite staying inside and doing everything over the phone is really quite incredible. We went on exchanges with other pair of Elders this week which was somewhat terrifying. I had a lot more space to talk during the lessons and a lot less help. During one lesson, my companion said "I'll say a prayer then Elder Smith is going to share the word of God with you" then after saying the p...

The tough part of doing everything over phone calls when you don't really know the language is that it's hard to figure out who anyone is. One of the great blessings of understanding more Portuguese this past week is that I'm starting to understand who is who and what the needs are of the various people we are teaching. Someone requested a Book of Mormon from us the other day so we called her and talked with her for a while. She had taken an Uber and her Uber driver told her a little about the Book of Mormon and what it means to him. She loved what he said and now she wants to read the Book of Mormon!  Another guy requested a call from us as well. He has been searching for years to find the true church of Christ and he largely decided that it had been lost after Christ died. As part of this search, he was reading the Bible online and came across a reference to the Book of Mormon in Isaiah. So, he went ahead and read the Book of Mormon. And watched the Restoration film.  Bas...