April 17th 2013

Hello family! It is P-day again, the wonderful day of the week that is less stressful for me! There is still stress, just less of it. Like, for example, someone calling us at 6:45 in the morning and saying that they never want to go back to church...but anyway, that is a story for another time.

We had a great blessing this weekend with one more baptism! I am so grateful that the Lord has been so merciful with us. It is true that as we are obedient and keep the commandments, he blesses us in everything, in every aspect of our lives. How much I wish I could get it into people's heads that the ONLY way to receive blessings is to keep the commandments. I love the scripture in Mosiah 2:41. It has become one of my favorites!

We are working hard to find more people to teach and baptize in the coming weeks. I am very excited to see how the Lord will bless us! Thanks for your prayers and faith. I am grateful for everything that you do for me. I am looking forward to the next 7 months of my mission. I hope I can accomplish everything the Lord calls me to do. 

I am very excited to go back home and see you all again though. I have changed a lot. I am not the "old" Spencer anymore! I hope that I can live up to all the blessings and privileges the Lord has given me.

Well, that is about it. Yesterday some new missionaries got on the mission, so we got to have lunch with the mission president and his wife (which are the best days ever!)

Love you all! Stay happy!

-Spencer

april 11th 2013

Hey family!! This week was great! We had General Conference, which was awesome as always (I loved Jeffrey R Holland's and Thomas S. Monson's talks). We are so blessed to have living prophets and apostles to lead and guide us today! We got to watch the sessions live in our chapel here in Goiânia with all the other members.

The biggest blessing this week was the privlege we had to baptize a family in between the conference sessions on Saturday! Everyone was so happy and we had so much involvement from the members of the ward here. I am going to miss this ward a lot. I want to come back and visit them! I love the time that I have here and don't want to get transferred. I am getting nervous, because I think that transfers are coming up soon...

So this week we are preparing another person to get baptized. I am so happy and grateful that the Lord is blessing us so much. It is true that obedience brings blessings. That is what Pres. Monson spoke about at conference and I agree so much with him! When we keep the commandments, God is so much more willing to bless us.

I also learned this week that patience brings blessings. Sometimes, we have to wait for the things we want most. Nothing worthwhile ever came easy, or quickly. We have to wait for what we want most, rather than what we want in the moment. But waiting and having patience always brings the biggest and best blessings to us. How blessed we are to know the Heavenly Father will always make things right when we wait with patience and trust in Him completely. That is something I realized while studying my patriarchal blessing lately.

Love y'all,
Spencer

April 3rd 2013

Man, time is flying by! I can't believe it is already April. Time goes so fast. It really is our most precious resource, cause you can never get it back once it is gone.

This week was great. We are being so blessed by Heavenly Father. We are working really hard to baptize a family that we have found. We re-marked baptismal dates with three of them, and they will get baptized this Saturday in between sessions of conference. I am so excited! I can't believe how merciful the Lord is being with us. All of our hard work is paying off.

The ward is so much better than it was when I got here. I remember when I first got to this ward in November, I was kind of scared and overwhelmed, worried about what I would be able to do to help out. Well, it is A LOT better now and I love all the members here. I hope they value the sacrifice that we are making as missionaries to help their ward out. Sometimes I feel like we get overlooked and ignored a lot. But I know that Heavenly Father is proud of me and the work I am doing.

We will be praying for all these people to get baptized in the month of April. (We have 7 people being prepared for baptism!) I would love it if you could remember us and our investigators in our prayers.

The church is true and I love you! :)

Love,

Elder Spencer D. Eastwood

March 27th 2013

Hello family and friends!

This week was great. We had a record number of investigators at church on Sunday: 10! We were so excited. We found this awesome family of FIVE who are looking for a church and some spiritual help. We taught them and they were like, "Yeah, we would love to go to church with you!" So we brought them to church and introduced them to the bishop and all the members of the ward.

There are so many people in this ward that are so excited to help us! The youth of this ward are awesome, always ready and willing to help. For example, last night, we visited with this family and marked a baptismal date with them for the 13th of April. They accepted it and got really excited! So, we called a bunch of members afterwards to tell them the good news and to invite them to help us teach this family. One young woman got really excited and said, "Elders, call me when you are going to go teach them! I really want to help you!"

I am grateful that I get to serve in this wonderful ward, and I hope I can stay in this area a little longer. I will be sad when I leave and I will miss everybody very much. People are so nice to the missionaries here. I have made some of my best friends here in this ward! I hope I never lose contact with them and that I can come back and visit them here in Goiânia after my mission.

 It makes me really humbled to be able to be serving in this work. The ward is so great here....and everyone makes fun of me because of all the weight I lost (so now, all my clothes are way too big and I look like an 80's bell-bottom dancer).

Anyway, I am excited for this week. Easter is on Sunday and then next weekend is General Conference (my second to last one, by the way). I love my mission and the things that I am learning!

Love you too! See you next week. And know that you are all in my prayers :)

-Elder Spencer D. Eastwood

March 20th 2013

Hey family!! This week was GREAT! I love the ward that I am serving in. All the members are so wonderful and most of them are willing to help. I feel very close to them and I am glad to call them my friends. I really hope I can keep in contact with them after the mission. It is such a blessing to have email and Facebook these days. There were so many members at our BAPTISM on Saturday!

That's right, we had another one!! And it was very special. It was one of the best baptismal services I have seen on my mission. I felt the spirit very strongly and I know that the members and families that were there did too. Im grateful for the opportunity I have to be able to serve here in Brazil and to know the people I have met and to have made so many wonderful friends here.

We had a family home evening on Monday night and we talked about the temple and eternal families. I almost got emotional when I bore my testimony, because I just love this work so much! I have no idea what I am going to do when I get home. As much as I joke about going home, I am really going to miss my mission. This has been the best experience of my life. I am going to miss all my recent converts, all the members that I have gotten to know better, and all the other missionaries. I am going to miss being able to just feel the Spirit all the time and be able to testify and stand up for righteousness and for what I believe in.

I love the temple! I love our Prophet! I love the Book of Mormon! I love my family! I can't wait to one day become a husband and father and be able to teach all these things that I know and love to my future family. I feel so blessed in everything I do. Even though there are always hard times, we have to keep pushing through the bad so that we can see the good. I think of a flower growing out of the ground. It has to push so hard to get through that rough soil. But once it sees the sun shine, things are so much better. it is like that with our lives.

Love you guys so much! You are the best!

-Elder Spencer Eastwood

PS: The pictures are from our baptism. One is me kneeling in the middle of the road asking the Lord for direction and guidance, (I really did that and my comp was smart enough to take a picture...I loved it!) And the last attachment is of a quote that I love from Pres. Hinckley!

March 13th 2013

This week was a great one! We had some success finally! After weeks of hard work, we had a baptism! I am sending some pictures. It was a really special meeting and I am glad that all the members helped us out so much. I love this ward and I will be sad when I leave it.

This week was hot...especially in our house. Our house has very few windows and gets really hot and humid in it. Aside from that and the cockroaches, it is a nice place to live.

We are working very hard in the office. This week they are doing some renovations. this past week we got a book from a convert in the United States about some ideas for making missionary work more successful... It is only in English, so I read some parts and translated it for my mission president and he liked the ideas. So, I will be translating the whole book into Portuguese and preparing it to send out to the other missionaries and all the missions in Brazil! That will be fun!

Well, this week we are preparing another young woman to get baptized on Saturday. She would have been baptized two weeks ago, but it didn't work out right. So we will baptize her now! I am excited and very happy!

here is a quote I love:

"At moments of crisis and challenge, some choose to abandon faith just at the time when it most needs to be embraced. Prayer is ignored at the very hour when it needs to be intensified. Virtue is carelessly tossed aside when it needs to be cherished. God is forsaken in the all-too-human yet mistaken fear that He has forsaken us. The truth is that our only safety, our only security, our only hope is to hold fast to that which is good. As the mists of darkness gather around us, we are only lost if we choose to let go of the iron rod, which is the word of God."

Love, Elder Spencer D. Eastwood

March 5th 2013

This week was busy, and unfortunately, a little bit sad. I know now, more than ever, that as much as we work and strive to help others, Satan works just as hard to bring them down. Our baptisms fell through this week. And both of the situation were out of our control. It was literally a situation where I felt helpless and didn't know what else to do except to get down on my knees and pray. We have been working so hard, and to see our baptisms fall through our fingers was very hard on me. I took it very personally and have been very discouraged these past few days.

But we have to stand up and smile! Whatever comes to us, if we face the future with faith, we will be able to do anything that the Lord asks of us. I know He puts trials in our lives to see if we will really do "whatsoever thing [HE] asks of us". Trials serve to make us stronger.

I was asked this past week by some new missionaries that I was training, "What is one piece of advice you can give us?" I responded, saying, "The same piece of advice I give to myself: Be on your knees every morning and every night".

This Church is true and Heavenly Father loves you. (Look that rhymes!)

-Elder Spencer D. Eastwood

3 Nephi 12:16

February 20th 2012

This week was pretty good. The only bad thing is that our three baptisms for this month all fell through. But we were able to save them all and they will be baptized on the 2nd of March! I ask for your faith and prayers, because we really want to help them out. There are two young women and one young guy. They are awesome and will make great members of the church!

The mission president was traveling all last week for the other zone conferences, and one of the other secretaries went with him, so I was basically taking care of everything here in the office. Man, mission life is crazy! I can't imagine how much stress the mission president must have, having to take care of 150+ young men and women. I was already stressed out after five days.

I am doing good. I have a cold and a stuffed up nose. Which I think is the weirdest feeling to have in a tropical country. But it is alright. We saw a monkey walking in the middle of the road yesterday. Completely normal for here in Brazil. This country is awesome!

I am doing great. I love this gospel and I love my mission. Im grateful that I have kept a journal for this whole time that I have been here so that I can always remember it.

I love you guys and I thank you for your faith and prayers!

Love, Spencer

Mosiah 2:41

February 13th 2013

The months are going by fast, I cant believe it is already the middle of February? (Why is there an 'R' in February?). English makes a lot more sense now that I know Portuguese, but it has also made me realize that English is a VERY hard language to learn and that there are some pretty stupid rules in that language.

Well, it is still hot and still humid here. That is never going to change. This week it didn't rain as much. And yesterday we had a zone conference. When we walked out of the chapel, it was one of the hottest afternoons that I have ever experienced! My ears got ROASTED the minute the sun hit them. At least they aren't peeling....yet....

Yesterday was Carnaval, which is the biggest holiday in Brazil. EVERYTHING is closed on this day. And no one was on the roads. goiânia is a pretty "calm" city. There were only like 10 people killed, compared to a hundred and fifty or so in Rio de Janeiro. That is normal though. Hahaha. There was a parade and lots of people dancing in cool and colorful costumes. Besides the park full of naked dancing people, it was just a normal day. In the evening we went to a member's house and had a big brazilian "churrasco" (barbecue). De-lish!

We are teaching a young woman who suffered an accident and is unable to walk because she broke her leg. She was so excited when we invited her to church. During the week, she arranged everything so that she could go with us! She got a stabilizer for her leg, crutches, and a bunch of other stuff. Then on Sunday morning, she was waiting for us to come get her! She went to Church and loved it! She is going to get baptized on the 23rd!

Another investigator has been having trouble believing in the book of mormon. So we challenged her to read and pray about it every morning and night. She did so. Sunday night, after gettting home from church, she knelt down (something she had never done before to pray), and asked the Lord to "touch her heart" if the things she had learned were really true. Right when she finished her prayer, her heart started beating rapidly, and she felt like it would come out of her chest! She said that that has happened every time she has prayed after that. What a miracle! She will get baptized on the 23rd too. I hope! 

We are praying and fasting a lot to have another miracle of 4 baptisms this month, which will be a record for the missionaries that work in the office.

Well, that was my week! Hope you all had a good one!

Love you!

-Elder Spencer D. Eastwood

february 6th 2013

Well this week was an okay one. We are still having trouble finding people to teach, but we did mark a baptismal date with an investigator for the 23rd. I hope that everything goes well. We could use some success. I feel like we deserve it!

We have been encouraging ward members here to help us in the missionary work as well as to travel to the temple. The ward and stake goals are different here in brazil, because of the distance of temples.

Daily Goals: Prayer (Personal and Family), Scripture Study

Weekly Goals: Attend Church and take the Sacrament

Monthly Goals: Fulfill a Fast and Pay Tithing

Yearly Goals: Attend the Temple at least one time

It is a bit different than back home. Im grateful that my family lives in Utah and we are so close to so many temples. They really are the greatest blessing in our lives. I can't wait to get back and be able to go serve at the temple again! I miss it a lot.

Well, I don't know why I am so HAPPY! I'm, like, tired all the time. But I'm still so happy! I love being able to serve the people here and I will be sad when I leave them. 

I have been studying the Doctrine and Covenants a lot lately and I really like Section 138 that talks about the Spirit World. It is interesting to think about what will happen when we die. We taught a lesson about this this past week. A family who has their grandmother in the hospital told us that she was scared to die. But really, we don't need to be - and we shouldn't be - scared to die. It is just another step in the journey of our lives. And after death, in the spirit world, everything is going to be so much better than it is here! We aren't going to have to worry about the problems we have here on earth. And we won't have to worry about our bodies - if we are too short, too tall, too fat, too skinny. It is such a blessing we have to be here on earth right now, but it will be a great blessing to be able to return to our father in Heaven again!

Last night we had a family home evening where we made this soup called "Tacacá"...it is this weird Indian soup from the northern part of Brazil. It has this weird gummy stuff (that looks like boogers) and shrimp and this leaf called "jambu" that makes your mouth fall asleep. I included the pictures in the attachment!

And below is a pic of me when I went to Burger King with Elder Reis last week!

Love you guys! -Spencer.