Bird Poop In My Hair

Letter from 6-8-09 - Three letters behind...wedding planning has gotten the best of me...sorry! Less than two weeks til Adam comes home - yippee! :-)

Bird poop in my hair

if i could sum up this week in one word it would be: holy-cow!

for the mission counsel we did something different this time. like i said it was two days long- some of the best two days of my life :) the first day there was p-day. it was so cool: where president lives is a virtual paradise. we played soccer with president and the other zone leaders all morning. on the beach. by the tropical forest. the ocean has got these little tropical, tree covered islands all over the place. it was a blast. after running around in the sand for a few hours everyone was beat tired, so we went back to president’s house and ate lunch and watched a movie. (passage to zarahemla) then some of us went down stairs and played basketball until we could hardly walk anymore. then we took showers and changed back to church clothes and had "family home evening" at president’s house. it was really an all night fireside. we stayed there until 10pm. he taught about repentance, and then we did a cool activity with two talks by pres benson (some of moms favs): beware of pride, and cleanse the inner vessel. Then we went to the secretary’s house, in another paradisiacal place here in rio that is on the beach. President called us and told us that he was going to kneel down and pray and that he wanted us to kneel down with him and pray with him. He said that he would call and tell us to stop when he was done. And so we started to pray. We prayed and prayed. It was funny because we were all sleeping in the same big room on mattresses and bunk beds everywhere, the lights were off and everyone was kneeling on top of their beds praying. In less that 15 min somebody started snoring. Everyone giggled a little and then somebody threw a shoe at him. He woke up and continued praying. One by one as the minutes went by, missionaries gave up and fell asleep. Some of us solved the problem by changing the praying position every once in a while. Kneeling up, kneeling down, sitting in the Indian position, standing, or in the classic muslim praying position. That night i learned an important lesson: after playing soccer in the sand all day, i am no longer at the spiritual level of being capable of offering a meaningful, hour long prayer. :-)

i caught myself mostly praying that i could stay awake and that president would stop praying soon. :-) after a little more than an hour pres called. All jokes aside, it was a really neat experience, and the Lord talked to me that night too.

The next day we went to president’s house and had another day of learning. He gave a great talk of two hours about the “enemy of all men”, or satan. The best part of all the trainings that he does there is that he lets us ask any question that we want, about the theme. Then we had to deal with all the needs in the mission. After that president took us out to a nice rodizio de churrasco for lunch. It was the best.

MOM-
Regarding the debit card situation - the funny thing is that it stopped sometime in may. The diet thing was joke. I am still NOT fat, but that isn’t because i don’t try. It’s because i am always out of money and there is no food in our house- so i don’t eat as much as I’d like. As far a college goes- i plan on getting into debt anyway... so go forward and sign the contract to live with Caleb and Jimmy, even if it's more money than we planned. i don’t really know what i want, so, heck, why not. Lets go for it. Thanks for helping me get registered at BYU, apt., etc.!

I don’t really know why sis roberts emailed me. It didn’t say happy birthday. She said that she had been talking with some guy named brady that knows you.

DAD- PARABEMS happy bday pops. 42 now huh? Wonder what that feels like. Probably the same as 100. elder pili is so happy that the lakers are in the finals. I hope the magic win.

ALYCE- take it easy lady, cant wait to see you. Yesterday at church we had a cool lesson about thoughts. The teacher said that we cant control if a thought will come to our heads or not. It is like birds flying over our heads. We cant stop them. BUT we can keep them from landing on our heads. He compared it to BAD thoughts, but i compare it to thinking about going home. The birds keep coming. And every once in a while they even land on my head. (every Monday) but i am doing my best to keep them from building a nest.

LOVE elder helland