Temple and New Years 2025

 Friday, January 3, 2025; Iranduba Branch, Iranduba, Amazonas, Brazil:

This week my p-day was moved to Friday so that we could go to the temple! 

My day was super busy, as we took a taxi to Manaus, and then an Uber to the temple, and then another taxi and Uber back to my city, Iranduba.

I will talk about the temple first; it was super awesome! I guess I didn't realize how much I miss worshipping in the temple, being that I have been serving in other states for several months and haven't been to go to the temple. Made me realize how lucky I am and how blessed those are who live in or near a city with a temple. 

Also, I gotta say, the temple is super beautiful. They used native plants and designs like that to make decor in the temple. Usually, I love looking at that the most. But this time I enjoyed all of the paintings, of Jesus, of other prophets and Scripture stories. It made me wonder how I can make artwork that inspires people to come unto Christ to that level. Maybe I need to learn to draw people. But at the end of this email I will talk about one thought I had received in the temple. I had some really awesome personal revelation of how to be a better missionary and person while in the temple. 10/10

But happy New Year to all of you!

This past week and a half went by super-fast. Being the week of New Years, coming off of Christmas, everyone just wanted to take a break and party. Just like any weekend here, Christmas is a time when people don't work as much and want to party, including lots of people drinking alcohol. 

However, I feel like New Year's was on a different level. People drank New Year's Eve, stayed up late, then woke up and drank all of New Year's Day too. Honestly, I think that during the combo of New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, I saw the most amount of alcohol/empty beer cans and bottles that I have ever seen. Not including the distributors, who always have a ton. But that's to sell, not to drink. 

I had the thought that perhaps people woke up New Year's Day with hangover and being tired from the late night, and decided to drink to get rid of those two things...   

I'm not trying to rant about beer/alcohol being bad and all (but it is!!!). But besides that, New Year's Eve and Day had a bunch of fireworks. Mostly just loud. New Year's Eve we had a Manaus South Mission Zoom Call before midnight and talked about goals and goal setting. 

Our Mission President wanted us to set our own goals and think about goal setting, so that New Year's Day we could visit all of the people in our areas who have been baptized in the last year and help them set goals.  As we always say, baptism isn't the end of the path, but the start. After being baptized, we must continue following Jesus Christ. Following the path God set up for us. 

Something awesome is the simple but helpful resources page of the Church app Gospel Library, for helping New Members know what to do and learn next. Things like the temple and patriarchal blessings!

I thought it was awesome to make my own goals, and think about that, so they I could help others with doing that. My goals were a little complicated because I am on my mission, but at the end of February I will be ending my mission, and at some point, continuing college. So, there are goals that work now but not later, and others that work later but not now... but others work for the whole year, rain or shine.

But that made me think of what realistic goals I wanted to make? Unrealistic goals normally don't help us, so just stick to what's possible or relativity so.

I wanted to give two invitations today. ️The first is, for each of you to make goals for this year in the 4 categories: Physical, Social, Spiritual, and Intellectual. ️

The second one is based on some temple art. I'm not 100% sure, but the stained-glass windows have a pattern that reminded me of maybe a coconut tree. Not totally sure. But whatever it may be or just artwork, it's beautiful. It has a stack of triangles building upwards, each one in a parallel line. It reminded me of mountain ledges. If you were climbing up a rock wall, you would have to climb at a negative degree to get over the blockage of the triangle. But once you climbed over the longest part of the triangle, you would arrive on a 'ledge', the shortest part of the triangle being on top of it. And if you climb up and over, after the hard work, you will get to the flat top, a good resting place before the next level. Each of the triangles you had to 'climb over' is the same as the one before it. But just above the lower triangles.

Sometimes life is like that. One difficulty after another. We can decide to quit at any point. But the higher we get, the happier we will be with how far we come. And just like a mountain or coconut tree the higher up we are, the better the view. 

️My other invitation is keep going. Push past the difficulties. Learn what you need to learn, and don't expect it to make life easier. Just let it CHANGE you, for the better! ️

This week was good, I didn't have time to share everything good that happened. But it was good! 

Love y'all! 

Elder David Olson

Missão Brasil Manaus Sul

Iranduba, Amazonas, Brasil 

Pics-

-The Brazil Manaus Temple!

-Elder Gale and I with the temple Christmas decorations, and a young guy getting ready to go on his mission from 

Manaus

-A steep road with stairs going down... so steep no one uses it

-Happy New Year!