Greetings from Montes Claros Ramo 3!

I'll get the bad stuff out of the way first. Fernando was working out of town the whole week and Vicente traveled at the end of the week so their absence at church was sad yesterday. But thankfully this is the only sad thing I will talk about haha!

We had someone come to our house and make some adjustments to our water system and now we have water 90% of the time instead of the other way around! It's also been raining and cooling off a little so I'm super grateful for that!

This week really strengthened my testimony of prayer. There were actually 3 really cool experiences I had with prayer this week:

-At the end of a lesson, the family we were teaching asked us to pray for rain so in the closing prayer that's what Elder Vieira did and 10 minute later it downpoured.

-During a difficult morning I got my Patriarchal Blessing to read for comfort and before reading I prayed that it would help me out. Holy cow was that prayer answered. I have already seen so many blessings being fulfilled out here on my mission and I know without a doubt that I am being guided out here.

-Saturday afternoon was pretty hard with the heat and our lack of appointments. I prayed in my heart pretty desperately for Heavenly Father to just help us out somehow. He blessed us so much! We ran into members to teach lessons with that night, and were even able to make a really spiritual visit with our Branch President. It's hard for me to describe how miraculous this day was actually.

I've been reading in Alma this week about many wars. I got a lot out of the analogy of "cleaning the inner vessel." That's something I'm learning for sure is I have to be clean and have the spirit with me before I'm gonna affect anything or anyone externally. it's so important for us to repent every day so that we can be clean and worthy of the Holy Ghost.

I'm also learning how to love and see people as children of God. Yesterday night we taught a woman named Maria (which is actually the name of like 50% of woman here) who has severe depression. The whole lesson I was just taken over by how much God loves her! I hope our lesson helped her. We taught about how faith in Christ and acting on that faith can help her find more peace and happiness. And we also sang I am Child of God for her! I hope it helped her out and that she can find the strength to act on the faith she has.

I hope things are going well back home! I love you guys.

Elder Searle

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Elder Searle and Elder Vieira getting work done!