Rain, General Conference, voting

 Monday, October 7, 2024; Floresta Ward, Rio Branco, Acre, Brazil:

This past week was pretty good! How was y'all's week?

This week's weather was fun. It rained a few times, one of them being super-hard. The options were Rain, Sun and humidity, or clouds and smoke in the air. The rain was the best option. 

One of the days that it rained we got soaked. So... I won't be using those shoes for a few days. 

Sunday was like national Brazil voting day. So, we had a decent amount of rallies, car honking parades, and other campaigning happening this week. I guess someone thought that throwing small campaign cards on the ground will make people vote for their candidate...

But it's required to vote here in Brazil. Even the Brazilian missionaries like my comp, Elder Santos, from other cities and states had to vote, though online. I'm still trying to figure out exactly who and what places were being voted on  but yeah. Definitely interesting to see the voting culture here. 

We walked around 2 hours to arrive at someone's house. Just around the corner, right? 

I had a divisão with Elder Gale, an American greenie. He is super-awesome! He is super-motivated to work... just needs to work on his Portuguese a lil more. But he is super-animated! On the divisão, this decently big spider appeared in their house. Sounds like it isn't the first one either. 

Someone rode through the biggest street in our area on horseback. While not normal, horses are a mode of transportation still. 

This past weekend as I mentioned last week-we had General Conference! What a spiritual feast! I learned a lot! I watched all 3 of Saturday's sessions at home with my comp, just chilling, drinking terere. Then Sunday morning we went to a member's house and Sunday afternoon we went to the stake center chapel. What was awesome, was that-for the last session at the Stake Center-I got to see some members from other Wards and got to watch it with members of my Ward, including several new members. 

Preparing for conference I thought of two general questions that I wanted to have responded to in listening to conference. The first was:

• How I (or any of us!!!) can continue on in my mission, in my life, how I can preserver and endure to the end?

And the second was actually a very similar question:

• Where can we find peace from life's storms, find joy in life?

In response I thought about the subject of the talks given, and some of the themes included that of Hope and Repentance. I felt that so many different talks had responses to my two questions. 

But I wanted to mention a little about my favorite phrase, from a talk by Brook P. Hales from the seventy. And my story is a little funny. So, I watched all 5 sessions in Portuguese. So much better in English for me. But still awesome. Anyways, his talk theme was "Mortality works". But here's the thing. When I heard it in Portuguese, the translator said "Mortalidade vale a pena!". Then I translated THAT phrase to English, being Mortality is worth it!

Yes 'Mortality works' and 'Mortality is worth it' are saying the same thing. 

Either way, I love this phrase! For me often I balance the weight of decisions, whether it concerns money, time, effort, etc. And sometimes I find that the reward isn't worth the experience. Clearly there are two sides to that. For example, smoking is clearly not worth the price of cancer, etc. 

But taking away the hardships of life would be removing the purpose of life. Shortcuts in life will stay your growth. We need these experiences, this growth. We need the changes we are going through. 

So, my invitation to each of you is remember! Mortality is worth it! Life is worth it!

That's it, love y'all! 

Elder David Olson

Missão Brasil Manaus Sul

Pics-

-Pic with a member after watching General Conference 

-Elder Santos and I

-Smoke right after a downpour of rain

-Elder Gale comparing another spider from the night before with one the next day