Bishop, Thatcher PT

Hello Everyone! This week was really amazing! Through the combined efforts of some member friends and lots of connecting, we had 25 friends in Sacrament this Sunday! It was a rush of having people introduced to us, sometimes even "meeting" the same person a couple of times! We've got a plan to meet up and teach all of them this week, so we're really excited! There's a funny thing with names here. Obviously, my name is English, so that leads to some interesting misunderstandings. For example, my name is Bishop (duh), and that translates to Bispo, easy enough and not too bad. The other close one is Bicho (ch makes the sh sound in Portuguese), which means bug. I happen to like this just fine and enjoy being Elder Bug to some of the members. The real problem is that the closest sounding word is Bicha, which is a pretty derogatory slur. This can cause some looks of disbelief as I try and reassure people that my name is actually Bishop. I also ran into some tanks left o...

Hello Everyone! This week, we had my absolute favorite lessons with some amazing friends! It was right after a really good lesson with one of Agostinho's (a member in our branch) friends, Rodriguez, and he followed us to our next message to hear that one too! We then started to teach both Rodriguez and another friend called Rufina! For that message, we taught about the Gospel of Christ, and it was absolutely incredible! They had such great insights and participated in the lesson with such great enthusiasm! Because they were participating so well, I felt like I could better connect to these people and bear a stronger witness of the steps we can take to be closer to God and His Son. At the end of the lesson, we invited them both to be baptized on the 21st, and they were excited to accept! We met with Rodriguez later that week and had a lesson about a few commandments, and when we taught about the Word of Wisdom, he promised us he would stop drinking coffee if that was what God wanted...