Elder Rhodes Missionary Experiences while serving the Brazilian people

Dear Rhodes Family, Thank you so much for sending us such a wonderful missionary. He met with President and Sister Bangerter, met his new companion and already started working hard in his new area. We wanted to send you some pictures of his special first day in the mission.  We all love his beautiful smile.

I only have 10 more minutes to email but ill make sure I tell you guys some stuff. In the pics, I uploaded last week you saw us with our Brasileiro roommates. They are super awesome and just went to the field this morning. They actually taught me a ton of lessons and I love them for it.  Four of them did not speak any English and the other spoke a little. We learned a lot about culture and Portuguese from them. They were super funny and they were our roommates for 3 weeks. I just realized i never told you guys about them. There is an Elder in our district who is struggling and has decided to go home. He is leaving today and we are sad to see him go. I think that Elder Anderson is going to be a trio with me and Elder Morrow for the last week. I know that things are going to get tough and I know that I'm ready for it. I already have my go-to scripture picked out. DC 122, 7-9. The Son of Man hath descended below them all, Art thou greater than he? The ans...

This has been a good week.  We were able to go proselyting for a few hours on Saturday and it was super hard. We talked to everyone and pretty much had no success. I got a little feeling of what rejection is like. Anyway, it wasn't that bad. People love the missionaries here but a lot of them are just not interested. We taught our best lesson ever while here in the CTM. Our virtual investigator that is really hard, Andre, he told us he loves God and was just not seeing how the Book Of Mormon is from God. He was really giving us a hard time. Afterward, we felt like it was an awful lesson and we kinda felt like crap. That night we prayed and did a lot of scripture study. We found a perfect scripture for him. The next day when we were teaching him, he threw a major wrench at us and said his wife had a miscarriage and lost their baby. Well, we had prepared ourselves spiritually for this lesson and we shared some scriptures, testimony and sung a hymn for him in Portuguese. The spiri...

Well MTC is great. Food is exactly the same lol, but I'm surviving. Parental guidance suggested for this next part. So our mailbox is next to the cafeteria and we forgot to check it so we went down and apparently they had gassed the ceilings for cockroaches and there must have been 1000 dead roaches on our cafeteria floor. It was gross. Anyway, i still didn't have any trouble eating breakfast the next morning lol. Does anyone know the singer Nathan Pacheco?  He came and gave us an awesome devotional/concert. He is amazing and he sung songs like be thou my vision, forever, his love, one by one. Stuff like that and it was really awesome. He has a crazy good voice.  I know that my mom and dad know some of those songs so I've heard them before. Anyways look him up. He has a sacred songs album and you all should check it out. We are still teaching these investigators and we got a new one this week. We taught her the second lesson and she is like one of the hard...