Elder Kasey Lightheart

Elder Paulson, me, Elder Ruiz, and Elder Castillo Hey Everyone!!! Boy has it been an interesting week... to say the least.  Unfortunately, last P-day I wasn't able to draft up a blog myself, and rather my mom had to give a short little update on all that was going on with me.  Basically at the start of this week we were quarantined to our house in Brazil, still able to walk about close to our home, and walk over to our chapel to play sports.  Honestly, the saving grace of our weekend in quarantine in Mooca was being able to go to our chapel.  One of our members, who is honestly the BEST, not only bought us a basketball (since Elder Vanderwerkin was dying to play b-ball), but he also brought us dinner one night, and breakfast, lunch and dinner the next day, during our quarantine.  Ismael is honestly just so amazing, and we were and are incredibly grateful for his charity and love for the missionaries.  During the quarantine, they had to cl...

This week has been a long and CRAZY week! I am not able to write my usual email this week, due to Sãn Paulo being in somewhat of a lockdown, similar to what you all are experiencing at home. Because of this, the internet cafes are closed, which is where we go to get internet access each Monday. So, my mother asked me for a timeline of events that have led up to the crazy news that we just found out, which is that all missionaries that are not Brazil citizens are being sent to their home country. Everything has happened SO fast, as you can see from the following timeline: Thursday, March 12th - Church announces that church meetings worldwide will be suspended until further notice due to Covid-19 virus. Brazil only had around 75 cases of the virus at that time. Wednesday/Thursday this week (March 18th or 19th) - missionaries were told to avoid coming in contact with the elderly and anyone else who might be more susceptible to illness. Brazil had around 613 cases of the virus a...

Wow, has this week been crazy!! All of you are probably much more aware than I of all that has been going on in the world, with closures of just about everything that involves large gatherings of people, but even here in Brazil, which has been less affected than most places, we have had our fair share of strange and sudden occurrences.  But nonetheless, I have had a great week, and have learned a lot from my experiences this week as well. So this week we started of with our Zone Conference (which luckily we had before everything blew up about the Corona Virus) in which all the missionaries in our zone met up together for a big conference with our mission president.  We basically had our meeting from 9:00 to 4:00 in which we listened to talks from the President, his wife, the Assistants to the President, and our zone leader.  I was actually quite surprised with how much I understood from the meeting considering it was all in Portuguese.  In fact, it was very n...

Hello Everyone! My 2nd week in Brazil is already almost up, can you believe it? Because I definitely can't.  Let me just start by saying that this week was very interesting and different, to say the least.  It included lots of traveling, many testimony building experiences, and some difficult experiences as well. All in all, however, it was an amazing week, and I am grateful to be out here serving the Lord! Also, for this email, I would like to go day by day since I feel every day had something interesting or profound happen.  Monday : Today, after our P-day ended at 6:00 and the work continued, we were out and about trying to visit some people we had been teaching, yet no one was home.  While walking down a street full of houses in the light rain, I felt an impression to knock a certain door, but since we were not necessarily doing finding, and my companion wasn't stopping, I decided to ignore it, thinking it wasn't a big deal.  As we continued o...

Me with my Mission President, President Miller, and his wife. Hello Everyone!! I finally made it to Brazil!! I don't have a ton of time today, unfortunately, to talk about everything that went on this week, but I'll try my best to cover all the fun stuff that happened! First of all, I am now serving in the São Paulo East Mission of Brazil, in the Mooca area, and my companion is named Elder Steere.  Elder Steere is from Colorado and has been out on his mission for 8 months.  He is an awesome guy who, thus far, has been just a great companion who is doing his best to make sure I learn the language quickly here. (Side note from Kasey's mom: Elder Steere said during our call "Your son speaks Portuguese very well.") It has been pretty hard here with learning Portuguese, as upon arriving I discovered that I know so very little, but alas I am learning!  The people here, however, are very kind, and either give my reassurance with learning the language, or tease ...

At Carl's baptism. What a special experience this was! Hello all!!! Long time no see! For those of you who weren't aware my P-day this week got moved from Monday to Friday, so that's why I haven't uploaded a blog email yet.  These past 2 weeks since last Monday have been jam packed full of lots of fun memories, spiritual experiences, as well as humbling moments.  Earlier last week we had a day on Wednesday that was planned to the max, with several lessons, but one by one they all fell through. Although it was a little disheartening, it gave us time to plan for the week and for our friend Carl's baptism. Then, that night it opened up our dinner plans, so we went to Bonefish Grill, a somewhat fancy restaurant that we had been given gift cards to. We decided to bring the other elders in our household as well, and figured, if we bought the cheapest entrees, that we could all just pitch in a few dollars each, along with the gift cards, and get a solid meal. Well...

Another week down! I have to say that I have been absolutely loving it here in my little area in Florida, Cypress Creek. The more work I do here and time I spend with the members and people here, the more I dread leaving. As excited as I am to go to Brazil, I'm gonna miss this place so much. Nonetheless, I've still got a couple of weeks here and I fully intend to make the most of them! This week was absolutely amazing and, though it might have started off a little tough, it has proved to be one of the most miraculous and profound weeks I have had.  Starting on Tuesday of this week, things were quite interesting.. After our studies and lunch we set out to do some knocking for a few hours, and after little success and quite a few Spanish-speaking families, we ran into a gentleman named Ronny, sitting outside in his driveway with his mother. We ended up talking to him for an hour and a half or so about a lot of different things. Ronny was from Venezuela, but spoke really ...