Week 4 - July 14, 2022

First full month in the mission! 

Super busy week all around full of class and language study. This week flew by, and it's pretty crazy to think that I have a little over a week left before I fly to Porto Alegre!  The CTM has been awesome, but I'm ready to get into the actual field. 

This week on the 11th I turned 19!  I was able to leave the CTM and see the city with some of the other Elders.  We were on a mission to find soccer jerseys, but somehow, we found the only place in Brazil that didn't sell them lol.  We settled with some street food, and it gave me hope of the food being better on the outside.

Every week a new shipment of missionaries come in and go. It's a bittersweet feeling to say goodbye to some of these guys after getting to know them so well.  The sad part is that odds are I will never see them again.  In the short time that I've been here, I've realized that a mission is all about goodbyes. Despite it being hard to say goodbye, it's a cool feeling to see how happy everyone is to get into the field.  Before we said our final goodbyes this week, the entire CTM sang a song with the lyrics, ''I will go where you want me to go.''  That one line is the exact promise every missionary made when submitting their papers.  We are ready to sacrifice two years of our life in the place the Lord wants us.  Understanding the bigger goal of what a mission is about makes it a lot easier to see some of the missionaries go.

I was able to end the week with a trip to the temple with all the missionaries here at the CTM.  This week we went to the Campinias Temple which was a little over an hour away.  It was super cool to finally leave the city and to see what Brazil is like on the outside.  It started to feel real after seeing what my area will be like. 

Language training is going well. It's hard work but I enjoy the everyday grind.  It's a process!

Elder Copeland