Hey!!!!

Hey guys! How's life? Things are GREAT down here. How was everyone's week? Well, I forwarded to ya'll that picture of President Cordon with the 2 Apostles and Elder Mazzagardi (a seventy). It was SWEET!!!!!!!!! Seriously, it was pretty flipping amazing. We started off on Thursday night. We had to take the hour-and-a-half bus to Ponta Grossa, where we slept in the house of some other Elders. We then got up at 4 in the morning to catch our van at 5:30 to get to Curitiba at 7:30 or so. At around 9:00 the Apostles showed up. It was pretty sweet. Elder Ballard walked in first and Elder Anderson showed up a little bit late. Turns out, he had a friend (remember he was the Area president of Brasil) who needed his help so he went and helped him and showed up about 10 minutes late. To start off, they went and shook all of our hands.  But so, Elder Mazzagardi stated off by bearing his testimony to us and reminding us of the importance of obedience and serving with all of our heart, might, mind and strength. Then Elder Anderson went up and taught us about the Atonement. Have you ever had a special witness of Jesus Christ teach you about the Atonement? It was SWEET!!!! Then he finished up and Elder Ballard went up to teach us. He could see that we were all tired and invited us all to stand up and sing Called to Serve to wake up. He told about how the hymn came to be and when we sang it he was crying as well as a lot of us (including me). He then told us about missionary work and talked about how we can improve our work. Some of the quotes from the two of them that I remember:

• Do you believe in Christ? I know that He lives
• Its hard to receive revelation when you think that you're the man
• You are to do whatever you can while staying within the dignity of your calling to get this message out to these people

I don't really remember the rest off the top of my head but they were awesome. The spirit was there really strong. Really. Strong. It made me super excited to be a missionary and to be here sharing the gospel. Its true!!!!!

So, on to news a little less exciting, I had an interesting experience this week. The Financial secretary called me and asked me which airport is closest to my house. Yup, the infamous "trunky phone call" came. Sigh...

But yeah, so yesterday we had a cool experience. We were knocking doors and a guy answered. He didn't seem to want to talk to us and didn't seem to like us but I asked if we could share a message with him. To my surprise, he let us in. We then went in and started talking to him. To be honest, I thought it was going to be a bible bash (woe be to the foolish people who try to bible bash with me, they don't know what they're getting into...) but he started talking to us. He explained that he thought that all religion is a crock because the people don't teach what's in the bible and the religions exist just to blind the people and rob them. He said that he believes strongly in Christ but can't bring himself to join a church and that God needed to just come down and put His church on the earth and put things in order. At this point I was practically salivating to share the message with him. We explained the message of the restoration with him and he got really excited. When we started talking to him about the Book of Mormon, though, he got quiet. He though that we were going to try to sell him the book, but when we gave him a copy for free he got even more excited. Man, its great to see how the Lord is preparing His children to accept the message and how when we do all we can we'll find them. I love being a missionary!!!!

So, yeah, time's about up and I gotta run. I sure do love all you guys. I'm not too excited to see you, though. No offense, but I'd rather stay here and keep doing the Lord's work. This truly is the Gospel of Christ. He lives!!! He speaks today!!! All we need is the faith to listen to him. This work is true!!!

-Elder Marx