Hey,

I can’t believe the day finally came. Transfers happened this Saturday and Sunday. I will be staying in Maio and Elder Christensen will serve his last transfer in Mosteiros (my 2nd area of the mission). I can’t really describe how much I love Elder Christensen. He has become one of my best friends. I have spent 9 months of my mission with him, through the struggles and the tears and success and the heartbreaks and the stress and everything. I have passed some of the most memorable moments of my life with this Elder and I love him. I’m so grateful the Lord gave me the chance to serve with him. I have learned so much and grown so much. I will never forget the things that we experienced. I will never forget him.

However, I will be receiving a super awesome new companion named Elder Acord. I have met him and talked to him a decent amount of times at Zone Leader Councils and at Zone Conference and he is a super cool Elder. I can already tell we are going to get along super well and I really think we will have a lot of success. I’m so excited to see what happens. I just came on the boat yesterday with Elder Christensen and the 2 sisters to come get our companions. We will be heading on a plane (10 minutes flight) to take us to Maio tomorrow. Should be awesome!!

It was kind of a short week because we were in Praia last week for zone conference and came back to the area in the middle of the week. We have been teaching this woman named Elizia. We have been teaching her for quite some time now. She has promised us that she would come to church, but never came. She even told us that the Sundays before she would get all ready for church and just sit in her house. She didn’t know why she couldn’t leave, but she just didn’t. We taught her these week we our recent convert Pedro. When we invited her to come to church, Pedro offered to pass by her house on Sunday to pick her up. This Sunday, after so much work and so many unfulfilled invited, Pedro brought Elizia to church. It was a beautiful sight.

Since we don’t have internet in our church at the moment, we weren’t able to watch General Conference this last week, however, this week we downloaded all of the session of GC onto a pin drive in Portuguese and this Saturday and Sunday we watched all 4 sessions. These members only have 2-4 months as members and they hungered to hear the words of living Prophet. They understood the magnitude of hearing the words of a prophet, which are truly the same words of God. At each session we had around 25 people. At church this Sunday, we finally broke the record and reached 28 people in the sacrament meeting. It was a wonderful sight. I will send a picture.

 I can’t even describe the love that I have gained for General Conference. The mission has helped me to realize the absolute importance the words of these prophets, apostles and seventies have to offer. These men are called of God. Called to reveal the true and pure doctrines of Jesus Christ and bear a sacred witness of His Holy name. These words uttered by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit are words of Christ that contain in them the guide to eternal life. There is absolutely no other thing more important that we can do with our time than study, ponder, and apply the words of these inspired men. What a great privilege it is to have revelation through holy messengers to lead us in these latter days – “We thank thee O God for a Prophet´´

I’m so excited to stay in Maio for my 5th transfer, should be a blast!

 Love,

Elder Rice