The Water Level

Whattup Monarchs,

How poetic that this week- the week I finally leave Embu and brave the world- is the one where we've officially reached the end of the Cradle advancements (at least those known as of the most recent book, Dreadgod). I'm going to have to find some other reference for my opening email salutations that 80% of my audience doesn't understand.

I've decided that this week was the water week. Why? Well, water is a fantastic symbol because you can use it to mean just about anything. Power, force, destruction, tranquility, peace, healing, etc. Water as symbolism is a little like statistics: you can take the exact same information and support whatever argument you want using presentation and context.

So what insightful theme have I assigned to this week that's connected to water?

Well... it rained a lot.

Rivers in the Desert

Also I fasted 3 days this week. Which is like, a lack of water, so that's symbolism or something. Also not for three days in a row lol I'm not crazy I basically just went lunch to lunch. And it was AWESOME you guys seriously I'm not being sarcastic. Fasting is something I was not very good at before my mission because I... well, I like eating. But in the CTM I learned more about fasting, and now it's awesome. This 3 day lunch fast was like a spiritual supercharge: highly reccomend.

Dire Dire Docks

But back to the rain. On Wednesday I did a division with my homeboy Elder Rosa. So we visit the house of Messias, top of the commandments lessons so that he can get baptized, and kaching. Everything's going swimmingly.

I walk out the door of Messias's house, look at the sky, and its lookin pretty cloudy. So I say "Wow. It's gonna rain today."

(In the literary business, we call that 'dramatic foreshadowing')

So we get down the road and figure out we're both broke (to clarify, I'm absolutely chilling on our allowance, I'm just stingy and refuse to pay 14 reais to withdraw cash) so we can't take the bus back to the center part of our area. Whatever, it's only like a 1 1/2 hour walk to our next appointment. We're chilling.

The rain starts.

Now I'm not even gonna lie to you guys: I felt pretty cool that day. Striding through the torrent, glassesless face carved with grim determination and masculinely framed by a soaking mane of missionary-appropriate length hair. So help me, Aluiso was gonna get taught the Post-Baptism lessons, and not even the watery maw of Leviathan itself could stop me. We finally arrived, watched a Book of Mormon video, and had a great lesson at the homeless shelter, then lost the rest of our day trying to have a coherent lesson with our drunk investigator. But it's really the feeling that counted.

But that was not the end of our watery troubles.

2 days later, the exact same thing happened to us as we had to take the same route home on the day of Messias's baptism. Messias's baptism was also highly stressful, cuz he hadn't shown up 15 minutes after it was supposed to start. Turns out he, from nowhere, had to go the hospital because of his foot wound. So, we wrapped that bad boy in enough film wrap, bags, and tape to bury a body and baptized him with a dry foot so that he wouldn't have pain or infect anybody. Afterwards, I shamelessly stole 6 brazillian hot dogs from the other ward which was having an activity in the chapel. Afterwards they gave us cake to take home and thanked us for coming. It was possibly one of the best days of my life.

Aquatic Ambience

Well. I had a whole thesis prepared about the "Living Waters of Life" thing that Jesus taught to the woman at the well, but unfortunately I have bowling to decimate and personal funds to waste on nerd trinkets at the mall in Itapecerica 2 (try saying the name of that area 3 times fast), so I don't have a ton of time. So just go listen to the BYU Speech "A Reservoir of Living Water" by David A. Bednar, and then imagine that I wrote that whole speech here to tie up my email with a nice, spiritual, and thematic ribbon.

Transfers are this week, so I'm almost definitely going to leave my lovely, cocooned first area of Embu and go to another part of the mission. It feels like I'm finally leaving training, and I'm looking forward to some new scenery. And we'll see who my new comp is! Also, I'm ~1/4 of the way through my mission, which is insane. Feels like I'm gonna blink and be at the end. But yeah. I hope you all have a great week!

God is Good,

Elder Ebbert