Hello Family,

Well this week was a week full of goodness, It was an amazing week. I loved it. We worked "até o pó" (until the dust). It was a really good week. Honestly I feel great about everything until now. I'm still growing and I don't know what to do in every situation but I'm growing and that's a good thing.

We had a baptism that was way good, I'll send a picture. We have some perspectives for the 4th and the 11th which are way good too.

I have too much stuff that it's really hard to carry it around on every transfer. For example I have a bag I don't use. Basically my big bag I just keep all the stuff that I never use. It's about half full and thinking about how full it was when I left, I don't know how I'm making it to every transfer with everything. I'm wanting to send home the stuff I never use. I've been trying to send it home for the last 6 months and I could never get it off.

I've honestly reached the point where I don't want to go home. Unfortunately it's an inevitable end that all missions come too. But if it wasn't for a visa, I would try to stay longer on the mission. I'm learning probably more than I will in two years at home.

There are A LOT of things I haven't told you during my mission. I've probably told you less than half of my mission and I want to apologize that it took me 1 year and 5 months to realize that I should tell these things. I'm not the best but I'm learning.

So, I can't tell you everything right now but I'll tell you one thing that happened this week and I'll keep telling things about the mission in other emails.

Right now I'm in Pedregal as a Zone Leader. I'm been here for about 3 and 1/2 months. One thing that I love from being a Zone Leader is doing Interviews. I did an Interview for a lady named Maria leidilane. She is married but her husband didn't want to join the church. He was totally against it but she went right ahead and wanted to get baptized. Her husband tried tempting her with coffee a lot of times but she held strong. One thing that I wanted to share was during the Interview, we were talking about her family and something really cool happened. We were talking about how families can be forever and I had the strongest Impression that her husband would be baptized one day too. I started to cry because I knew and I know that God loves this lady so much. It was one experience that marked my mission and it has been one thing that I love to do. I love to Interview the people getting ready for baptism.

My new year's resolution was to write in my journal too. so far... so good.

I had an experience just like that Elder that got hit but a truck, except I wasn't hit. This was about 7 - 10 months ago. I was in Planaltina de Goias and the buses there are crazy. Truely crazy. I've never seen bus drivers like the ones there. Well I was walking with my District Leader (who had already been my companion Elder Santos) and we were with the Branch President walking to do a visit with him in a place really far. Well,we were walking up a hill that went slightly up. We were walking and walking and a bus passed us. This street is a pretty big street and here... we usually walk in the street or close. In that particular area we had to walk in the street. The street was big enough for two buses going in the same direction on one side and two buses going in the other direction on the other side. A bus passed us and I just had a feeling to look behind me. Right when I turned, another bus passed right where the right side of my body had been 1 second before. It's really interesting how the Lord protects. He does that for all the missionaries in the whole world.

Right now we are working with Meiken (Mike). Remember him from a while ago. We could never find him but we found him again and he is doing good. He was smoking 2 packs of cigarettes and now has only smoking 1 or 2 cigarettes per day. He wants to get baptized. He told us "I got to get me baptized." We are working with him for Dia 4 de Março.

In our mission, we have two Standards of Excellence, a Silver and a Gold. The Silver works like a base line of the work we need to do and the Gold is the hard one. The president wants that 80%of the mission gets silver. It's like the minimum work we should do. Well one thing I'm way excited about is that these last two weeks me and Elder Giles have gotten Silver. But this week we went for Gold. It was amazing. We threw it all in, planned and did it.

I hope you like the letter because it's cram packed with information. Hope your brain doesn't explode.

Endure to the End (of the Letter)

Signing Out
Elder Barry