September 30, 2013

Ha! What a killer letter you sent. Aaah, Gratitude has always been a tender subject for me. So there is nothing like receiving a Gratitude  letter! You know, it’s amazing to recognize the tender mercies in our lives and we get that great feeling of gratitude in the heart that comes from the spirit. And then you share that with me, and just you sharing your personal gratitude hits me hard. Muito Obrigado for sharing Mom! You know, as missionaries we always know that God will bless our families while we are out. But being isolated from the family as a missionary, sometimes it is hard to really see Him pouring out the blessings. I can’t wait to go on some morning walks with you, It’s definitely going to happen since I already have the habit of waking up early, and then putting on the 3 hours of time change. Well I am so glad, you made my day, and that is saying something.

Well I guess I will share what happened today with transfers. I WAS TRANSFERRED! The crazy thing as well, so was my compnion, Elder Monical. There were some surprises in the transfers for sure. First of all, today is Elder Galves’ birthday, and what a better gift then being called to be Assistant of the President for your last transfer! Ha, wowzers! Good for him. It will help him finish off his mission working hard and not getting trunky! My very first companion is an Assistant! I guess that is cool! As for my companion, Elder Monical, here is a good surprise, he got put on Staff! He will be our Referral Secretary. So he will be doing a bit of what Gma & Gpa Smith do on their mission and he gets to spend some good time in downtown Aldeota. I think it will be very good for him. It was cool because I got to eat lunch with him today there, and I also have a lot of contact with him. Sister Bailey got put as the First Sister Trainer Leader thingy. Ha, funny thing is now she is the most experienced Sister in the Mission, and I think she will be returning home with me!

Oh yeah, and as for me! You might want to know that,right? Well I got transferred to a place called Conjunt de Ceará. It is very condensed here. I will be with Élder Soares. Also, I am a Zone Leader now! Ha, I must be getting old!  Bishop called that one. I am the first of my group. But wow, Zone Leader. Zone Leaders have always been my heroes in my mission. I have had a few that have made a big difference to me and now I am so happy to have this same privilege to serve and help raise these Elders up as great servants of the Lord. So Yeah! Crazy Stuff! I am excited, It will be interesting though, I will be sure to fill you in on the adventures we will have in our Zone.

Pheeeww... And I have still have a ton to tell you about Expedicionários and the last week I had in it. I had to work very hard this last transfer to keep our quality of work up. Tuesday we had weekly planning and for one of the first times in my mission I was kinda dreading to do it. (Usually weekly planning and Tuesdays are my "WOOT WOOT! Let’s get pumped for the next week" time) I wanted to finish off strong. Ha, in fact this last transfer was probably the most stress I have ever had in my life.... and if you know me, I am not a very stressed out person. I may be high-wired and hyper-active, but stressed... nooo.. Anyways, that left me pondering a bit about stress. That day I learned a lot. I liked a scripture that I found in Alma 7:24 which states "And see that ye have ^afaith, hope, and charity, and then ye will always abound in good works." Usually we get stressed when we have so much to do.  We get stressed when we don’t have faith, hope or charity. Also I thought a lot about how we must have a perfect balance of Patience and Diligence in our working lives. 

Anyways, after Tuesday, things started to look up. We started to find new people to teach, and then I also had a gratitude moment. I really realized how much the Lord has made me into a very capable Elder. Wow, it’s really incredible I would make the little Greenie Elder Cetraro so proud. When I have a great attitude of abundance, full of faith, hope, and charity, I really can move things along. It made me happy. The Lord prepares the way when you have the faith. 

Also everybody kinda already knew that I would be leaving. So this last week was definitely used to say my good-byes. Evellyn got confirmed, and we did good work this last week intergrading her, and her Mom with some members. So I hope the work will continue on there, especially after all the work we invested there this whole transfer. Ivanilda and Patric are doing well. Patric passed the sacrament to me Sunday. Wow, first time someone I baptized used their priesthood to give me the sacrament. He also is starting to bring his kids again to church. The Ward will do a service project there in Eliza’s house, that will be a great miracle! As for Tiara, Wow, she never ceases to amaze me. She gave me a little pocket Bible that I can use in proselyting, and then she gave a talk this last Sunday in Sacrament Meeting. She is a star. Of course, as well, my best friend Bishop Feitosa gave me plenty of thanks in every meeting we had there. He testified that I really left a mark there in the Ward, and that I will never be forgotten. I love Bishop, So yeah, that is how it went down.

As for my time I spent there in Expedicionários, wow, it really was a place of growth for me. It was there that I really learned and grew in leadership and I believe the turning point of my mission where I began to really be an instrument in the Lord´s hands, blessing many. I know that the Lord is always there to invest in us, and what He asks in return is to do service, joyfully with great happiness in our hearts. I know that the Learning Journey Never Ends. I am very happy. There isn’t a bigger blessing than being able to participate in the Lord’s work, and I sure do know that I have a loving family that is backing it all up. I love you all and I hope God’s mercies continue to pour upon us both as we press forward in our new chapters of our lives. Até Próxima Semana!

-Elder Zachary Cetraro

September 16, 2013

Heyya there!

 As for my week. Well, let’s say Me and Elder Monical get a long really well. We are good buds. This week in Zone Training, I had a funny experience... So we were practicing teaching the Law of Chastity, and I asked Elder Galves to show us how to mock a proposal in a lesson. So I volunteered to be an investigator and then they called Sister Miess to be my "Girl Friend" Ha, so you can already see where this is going right... well during the practice, they asked Sister Miess why she would like to be married, and she said she would like to have kids. Eita... Then they asked me if I would keep this commandment or not.  I said yes, so they told me I needed to propose to her. WOOWW.... Awwwkwwward.... So I did my first proposal in Portuguese that day. It was terrible. Ha, but the Zone got a good kick out of it.

Then for another awkward moment with girls. Friday I went to the Sister’s area to help pass by a list of referrals for them. While we were doing it, I came into a little Vila and we needed to go to casa seis, and I thought casa tres, so I knocked there, then realized that it was the wrong house but then a young girl about my age peeked around the corner and was like "Omg, I can’t come to the door right now but I reeeeallly want to talk to you guys, can you pass by tomorrow?!?!" I made a note for the Sisters and when they passed by they said she was really interested but also said,  "Aww I feel so bad I couldn’t of talked with the Elders, they were sooo gorgeous!!" Haaa, so it was an inspired contact for sure! So God uses our gifts in funny ways, right? Luckily I won’t be teaching her!

Elder Monical gave a talk this last Sunday, and he spent 2 weeks preparing it but I think it went good. Ha, and when I arrived, I was told that I’d be giving a talk as well, so I had 20 minutes to prepare, but I just winged it. I ended up just going up and cried and bore my testimony of how I know that God enables us to speak for him, as he has done to Elder Monical, as he has done for me, as he has done for Moses, and He will do it as well for us as we are sharing the gospel. 

We had some drama with our baptisms though this last week. Gerson, a young man that we have been teaching for weeks, we got him and his little 11 year old sister prepared for baptism and his Mom was going to go and watch and everything. But on the day of the interview, his little brother who helps a lot in another church took him to the house of a Pastor, and they confused him a ton. He went and passed the interview but he wouldn’t go to church, because he was scared to be baptized. It is just really sad because he knows the Book of Mormon is true, and he believes that the church is true, but he is just scared of all the stuff he has heard from the people he has known and trusted for so long. We still baptized Evellyn, his sister, but honestly the baptism felt a little empty. Oh well. Pray for Gerson and his Mom Ana this week okay??

Alrighty that’ll have to be my report for now.

Love you all and have a wonderful week!

-Elder Zac Cetraro

(Editor's note: on Tuesday, August 20, I got a call from the mission office saying Elder Cetraro had been mugged and got his debit card taken and it needed to be cancelled. This is the experience he is speaking of in the beginning.)

Alrighty..

Hello Fam!

Yeesss, I am totally fine. I’m sorry if that first heads-up wasn’t detailed enough, I was standing there next to the secretary ready to fill you in if you freaked out. But it was chill. I guess I can tell you a bit more about it but I would like to forget about it a bit.

So like I told you in my last week’s email. I was in a different area with different missionaries who were all waiting to pick up their new companions. Like what I also said in the email we will probably go check out the ocean. Well it was the combination of these two that pretty much caused what happened. So Tuesday we were supposed to go to the office at 4 o´clock. After lunch me and another American got a glimpse of the ocean from afar and went all "goo-goo gah-gah... omg omg omg omg" If you can understand, I haven’t seen the ocean the whole time I have been here. Well what happened was the Elder whose area it was said, "Well you guys are in luck, because our next appointment is right by the beach." And then while we were going there he said "Oh! On the way there is a great view, it’s a bit dangerous though."

So yeah, we swung up by this hill that really did have a great view and I of course had my camera for that. But as we were leaving there appeared a bunch of kids. (like 12-16 years or so) and one of them had a broken beer bottle yelling at us to get down on our knees. I wanted to run, it would have been the best idea. But sadly though, the other two missionaries got down on their knees and if I would of booked it or fought back (I’m a black belt so I definitely already had an action kick-butt plan in my head) but if I would of done that, the situation would turned active and I would of put the other two Elders in danger. So they ended up taking my camera (I already hid the memory card in my back pocket) and my Missionary Manual, which had the (debit) card and money for a taxi. Funny thing is usually I don’t carry these things but due to the occasion I had them. I didn’t have a bag I just had these two things in my pocket so I couldn’t hide them. The other American Elder had his camera and wallet well hidden in his bag so he got away lucky.

But yeah, don’t worry, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t of handled, nothing crazy. I do kinda feel bad though because I was the oldest Elder there, so I should of been more responsible, but then again, I didn’t know the area at all to make those judgment calls. But yeah.

Anyways as for the rest of the week. So we stayed in Expedicionários and I am with Elder Monical. He is a tall kinda quiet guy and he kinda reminds me of Uncle Jared with how calm and athletic he is. Anyways, he basically forgot most of his Portuguese because he spent 3 months out of the MTC not using it. So it has been interesting. I will have to really focus to help him participate in the work and really grow in this transfer. I am able to do the work but I can’t do it all and neglect him the growing experience and practice that he needs, so hopefully this next week we will figure it out.

As for the work I felt like it was a little slow this week since I didn’t have the opportunity to do weekly planning or do weekly goals. It is amazing how slothful we become without these two things. I will want to do this weekly planning and goals after the mission for sure! But it was waaay cool though because I didn’t tell you about Tiara from last week.

So last Friday I got a phone call from the office that they had a great referral for me to baptize. So we swung by Saturday afternoon and she actually was just about leaving. But real briefly I asked her how does she already know about the Church. She shared with me how at the moment she is without religion because she has studied the Catholic church’s history as well as the Baptist church’s history and she didn’t like what she has seen. She said that she already has looked into and studied a bit about the Mormon Church and has a return missionary co-worker that took her to some church things and gave her a Book of Mormon. I know an elect when I see one so I just briefly bore my testimony of how God has answered her prayers and sent us and gave her the first 3 lessons to read. So she did, she went to church with us, she loved it.  We passed by her house last Sunday afternoon (while I was still with Elder Medrado) and we ended up teaching her the Restoration and about the Gospel of Christ and she accepted to be baptized. We then tried to pass by during the week to teach the commandments but basically with studying and work she has no time whatsoever. So we ended up just teaching her everything that afternoon. She already was living all the commandments. We really could of baptized her right then and there. Thing is though that night was transfers which means a night of packing bags and not baptisms.... so we put it off for this week. But yeah, she was the driest Mormon I have ever met and wow she is 19 years old and I think she has a desire to serve a mission. I am excited to see her blossom in the church.

Ha, but thanks for the updates. My companion actually already told me about the temple video he was there last week..... Jealousy....... and I am excited to see it as well but I am sure that just being in the temple will be good enough for me.

Gotta go! Love you all, have a great week!

-Elder Zachary Cetraro