From Portugal With Love: Feliz Pascoa from Portugal

Happy Easter to everyone! We are so grateful for our wonderful Savior, who gave His life in our behalf and was resurrected, so that we will all be resurrected after we leave this mortal life. How we love and worship Him and strive to follow His example in our daily lives.

We had a great week. On Monday we left the office a little early to have our teeth cleaned. It is much more reasonable here, but they wanted to do $1300 worth of work on our teeth. I think the cheap cleaning is just a way to get you into their office so they can find all kinds of work you need done. Needless to say, we did not succumb to their wishes.

We were invited to Bishop Ribeiro’s home, along with Elders Staples and Oliveira, on Monday night for a nice dinner, visiting and a video on the Savior. They have an adorable family with a 2-1/2-year-old son who never stops moving and two daughters who are 8 and 12. We really enjoyed our evening. On Friday night we invited our two young Elders to eat with us at our apartment. Elder Staples expects to be transferred this week; we will see what happens.

Gavin turned 14 this week and Jared is now 25 years old. We hope that they both had great birthdays.

Miguel Adriano’s son returned from his mission to Orlando, Florida, on Thursday. We arranged to be in the Miratejo Ward today so that we could hear his talk. When Bishop Santos heard that we were coming, he decided that Elder Henry should also speak. We heard from Miguel’s wife that he was going to be a speaker long before he was asked by Luiz Silva, who works in our office. Both Elder Adriano and Elder Henry gave wonderful talks, along with Miguel. The funny thing that happened is that we arrived at 9:30 (even with setting our clocks ahead one hour) and waited for the combined RS/Priesthood meeting to begin for about 30 minutes. When it finally started and the Almada Ward Bishop started to give the lesson, I turned to Mike and said, “Do you think maybe the wards traded time slots at the beginning of the year?” We hurried out just in time for the Miratejo Ward Sacrament Meeting to begin. I was thinking that I didn’t recognize very many of the ward members, but we had heard that there have been lots of baptisms since we started attending the Caparica Ward.

We were invited to eat Easter dinner this afternoon with Elder and Sister Johnson and President and Sister Fluckiger. It is always enjoyable to get together with the couples in our mission. Today has been very windy and stormy, so we got pretty drenched in our comings and goings.

We are planning an outing with Paula Castro (our Brazilian friend) on Tuesday to show her around Lisbon, so we are hoping for a nice day. Actually yesterday was quite beautiful, so we should have done it then. We did go to Costa de Caparica to check on some new missionary housing. It looks like we may have two sets of Elders there soon.

We are well and continue to enjoy our opportunity to serve here in Portugal. We send our love to all