Back Home Too Soon!

Hey everyone!!

So right now I’m emailing you all from my home! What a crazy experience I’ve had these past few days! Phew!!

All right to start it all off I’ll talk about the millions of years it took to get home because of how many missionaries were waiting at the airports. So at the beginning of the week we sat around doing nothing. Except about three days before we had to leave Brazil we had to call our stake president and coordinate a van to get 14 missionaries from my zone to the airport in Florianopolis. That was definitely crazy and a little difficult ha ha. Anyways so once we got that all figured out a fun little side story was that as we are leaving the house this crazy angry lady knocked on her door and started yelling at us because we were making too much noise. She went off about how we were missionaries for the church of God and how I guess that means that we have to be quiet hahahaha. And then as we were leaving her husband said that he’d call our pastor which I thought was funny because we don’t have a pastor.

But anyways we all got to the airport at Florianopolis successfully, and we saw the group of about 80 missionaries from my mission ready to go back to the United States. And I was just about to ask what we’re gonna do then the guys from the office told me that because my name starts with a ‘W’ I was going to stay back another day! Wow! That got me going a little crazy haha because we ended up staying a whole other day and then we finally got to the airport in Florianópolis to get to São Paulo at around 12:00pm. When we got to the airport in São Paulo there was about 1,000 missionaries from all over Brazil waiting to get on their flights! So what ended up happening was we waited all day long to get on our flight at around 8 o’clock. The line for our baggage claim to check baggage was honestly the longest line that I’ve ever been in hahah it was huge!!!

But anyways everything worked out just fine and we all got on several charter planes back to the US, Los Angeles to be specific. And when we got to Los Angeles I scheduled a flight to Seattle then to Pasco. The flight to Los Angeles ended up being around 10 to 11 hours long and it actually wasn’t too bad. I rode with several other missionaries to Seattle then quite a few missionaries to Pasco. I was actually really nervous to get home to see my family because my family is amazing! But now I’m here at home feeling super out-of-whack and out of place! I feel like I am breaking the rules for cheating the system seeing my family and hugging everyone! It’s crazy!!! ha ha. I don’t know how is it that I’m still on the mission and I would have never thought this day, or experience, would have ever happened to me in my life! It’s crazy! This virus is really messing up things and I just hope that all of you are doing ok and you’re families are ok!

I just want to say that I am going to miss my mission and Florianópolis extremely bad, and I will never forget the experiences that I had in the best mission on planet earth!!

I want to bear my testimony that I know this church is true that God loves his children and that no matter what is happening in the world right now, everything is going to turn out OK . I love you all and I hope you have an amazing week and I hope you all stay safe!

Love Elder Whelan

-picts of us having sacrament meeting at home