Learn, Learn, Learn!

Alex at Cheney's Cookie Shop on his P-Day

Oi, everyone, from your favorite missionary! This week I received somewhat fewer e-mails from my family, which means I have a bit more time to focus on talking to all of you. I'm sure the viewers number in the thousands. ;)

To begin with, let me talk about some of the fun things I've been up to. I wish I had more stories to share, but at this point everything is just learn-learn-learn, so I'm doing lots but haven't really done a lot of cool Brazilian stuff yet. P-Days (the day of the week when we get some time off, for those of you who don't know) are really great. We actually get to go around the local city and explore/buy things. It's really hard not to spend all of my money, there's so much cool, interesting stuff to get. The food is different, the language is different, but the people are just people... if a little bit nicer than the average American, haha. Oh, and also the Brazilian National Anthem is the coolest song ever. We sing it every Sunday, and I look forward to it each week.

As far as language study goes, I'm continuing to leap forward. I definitely have a semi-photographic memory or something, because I can memorize 35 vocab words with ease after reviewing them once. There's always a couple that throw me for a loop, but overall problems are minimal. I'm not saying it's me. I absolutely know it's Heavenly Father helping me out through the Spirit. Especially based on an experience I had over the weekend. I was getting frustrated with my companion a little bit for getting off task, and our relationship was clearly suffering. But even though I stayed on task diligently, I wasn't learning as well. On Sunday I realized that I was placing too little value in his extreme kindness, love, and humility. That day we started getting along better and now we're very much in sync. The next day in the morning I wrote down a few questions that I hoped to have answered throughout the day in study, relating to myself and the gospel. One of which was how to learn better or faster. That day I found that I was learning at an increased pace, and definitely received the answer that the secret, for me, to better learning is more love and humility ALONG with diligence. So yeah. Not only was my question answered, but I realized the importance of these qualities. And also learned a little bit about leadership in the Church from my companion.

More things to say in these last few minutes I have left...

1) Coolest thing I've learned in Portuguese: "Cool cool cool," for you Community fans, is "legal legal legal," pronounced like lay-gow. I say it all the time.

2) I heard that the Catholic church put out an official declaration recognizing us as Christian. I dunno if that's actually big news or not, but all news seems cool here!

3) Congratulations to Alivia Burnham on her mission call. I know she'll do a great job and I'm excited for her

4) And finally, WRITE TO ME!!! Talk to my family about the best ways to do it, but I love to hear from people. I really do. I like to hear what's going on, no matter how insignificant. Heck, just say you love me. I know you all do ;)

5) Ok, so not finally. Please forgive me for any horrible grammar mistakes I made, just know I'm on a tight schedule here. Forgive me.

Sincerely,

Elder Burt