So much happened this week. The highlight is that we got 3 baptized.
It was way too much stuff packed into one week. We were super bummed out because we didn’t get a lot of people at church, at all!!! We got only 7. We set a goal of getting 19… We were/are super upset. The main problem was 3 big families didn’t show up.
• One of the families father’s traveled to the Volta Region this week to his hometown for the new year so his family didn’t want to come to the new church without the father there to lead the way
• Another family promised us to come and just didn’t show up. An unexpected someone came and invited them to a something rather at another church. I called them on the phone and asked them, “what happened?” They said that they were unexpectedly invited to a program.
I then told them we invited them to a program 2 weeks ago and they didn’t come, then we invited them to come every day last week and they still didn’t come. BUMMER!!! I still think they have a chance though.
• We had a father who was going to bring his whole family. His friends are all members. However there was a big football match on Sunday night and he works for the ECG (electrical company of Ghana) and he had to go make sure that all the electricity for the city was going to be on. The power always goes off here in Ghana, they are on like a ‘lights off’ schedule and he had to make sure that the power was going to be on during the game so the city wouldn’t riot haha. Crazy eh?
Man so we were bummed. However amongst all the disappointment, we did have a man named S bring his family to church in Kade. He has come twice now. He has a wife, an 8 year old girl, a 4 year old boy and a brand spankin new baby boy. The wife couldn’t come to church because she had to go and ‘show thanks’ to her church because they did the baby blessing at the church last week. She is very interested in our teachings because of the emphasis on the family. Only struggle is getting everyone to sit down together as a family and teach them. It is a little bit of a struggle probably never having done it before.
Sitting down as a family and keeping track of all the little kids and getting them to sit down must be tricky. The little 4 year old boy thought he was going to die when he went to primary and got a little restless and squiggly during sacrament haha. It made me laugh. S has been going to many churches and has been very upset because he noticed that they were all different and was very confused on where to go. He noticed that the ‘gift of tongues’ thing they do here (go “hubabugagaaaaanoisenoiseblahblah” and roll around in the mud) is not true. He finally just started attending a church that didn’t do that stuff. We then came to meet him, stays next door to a member. I contacted his wife and offered to help her stir her banku (which is quite a task, gets you tired) she politely declined. S then came and we were able to teach him. He is doing really great. I’m glad we are able to teach him. He too prayed about the message. On Sunday morning he was tired and was going to sleep in and not come. He had a dream where an angel dressed like us visited him and told him that he needed to get up and go to church and that it was of the utmost importance for his family. So luckily he came. Man what is with Ghana and all the dreams?
So HERE COME THE EVENTS OF THE WEEK!
• Baptism on Wednesday – We baptized R. R has had a rough life and was so ready to get baptized. We came to the single adults program on the 31st of Jan and they asked him to help MC and he was really happy. He came to the program talking about Temple Marriage and Eternal Marriage. It was really cool. He is excited and will be a good member.
Wednesday started off really poopy. At 6:30 am we got a call (bad enough to get a call at 6:30 huh?) and it was our member from Kade. He said that his wife went to Accra to collect some items to sell and didn’t want to be baptized that day. She said that she wants to take her time etc. I don’t know what is holding her back. She told us that she wants to go to the temple etc. We explained that the way to the temple is baptism! She knows it is true though. Her husband is really sad. I can imagine that it would be really hard to have a companion who is not walking with you and your family on the path. Please pray for them. I think we are going to read the scriptures a whole lot with her and her family sitting right by her side. We are going to baptize 3 of their family members in 2 weeks so hopefully she can be baptised with them.
• Baptism on Thursday – We went over to Subi to get the young sisters G and F to their baptism. The two are sisters they stay with their parents, who we are also teaching. Their mom doesn't understand English. The father does not want to sit down with us yet, but maybe with time he will come.
We went to collect them for their baptism and the parents said that they were busy and couldn’t come. So we disappointingly took them by themselves to their baptism. Just as we were trying to catch a taxi to the church, it started to rain like mad! Mad! MAD!
We finally caught a car, full of a buncha people trying to escape the rain. Elbows were shoved in ears etc haha. When we dropped from the taxi we all darted to the nearest covering which happened to be a ‘spot’ or bar that was closed. ALL the roofs here are made of tin sheets so the whole town was super noisy! CLACK CLACK CLACK the whole time. We were going to dart down the street towards the church and take cover there and get dried off as it was getting to 4 pm and we didn’t want to start the baptism late or have our presidency go home etc. Only problem is F was having a hurt foot. She wacked it with a cutlass at the farm, it was okay though. She couldn’t really run.
Elder Afu and I decided to pray. We said a prayer that the rain would stop just for long enough that we would be able to get them to the church and baptized then it could rain all it wanted afterwards. At around 4 the rain stopped and we were able to get them to the church, hold the baptismal service without the roofs going CLACK CLACK. It was awesome.
• Young Single Adult New Years activity Party! – Well the young single adults were going to have a party and activity to celebrate the New Year…and find other single Ghanian members to marry haha. The Abomosu branch had an activity with all those games like pass the apple haha, our seniour couple missionary Sister Terry must have organized that one. She wants them all married off very soon haha. Down here in Asamankese they had a morning full of football, sack races etc. Then at night time they had a dance with food and stuff. The girls got themselves all ‘blinking.’ This means they got all their glossy lipstick on and also their shiny weave on hair stuff.
It was fun. They all danced etc. They had a game where they made people pick a card and it had embarrassing stuff on it they had to do, like they made our YSA guy bleet like a goat into the microphone etc.
It was fun for the young single adults. Of course some of our recent converts who were underage came and instead of kicking them out, we fed them and they got to hang out with us the missionaries the whole time. SUCKAS! They eventually lost interest and went home. We stayed and chopped loads and loads of food and helped some of our recent converts make friends.
• 1st January temple president talk on Eternal Marriage fireside – We got our newest member R to come to the fireside talk about Eternal Marriage. He liked it. I wrote down a lot of notes to show one of our investigator families, bro D. D. came to see the Giddyglows wedding and he is wondering about all of this temple marriage stuff.
o One of the good things I got from this fireside was from the temple president’s wife. She talked about the CTR rings, not just meaning ‘choose the right’ but talked about how to keep ourselves pure and to keep the law of chastity. She said we need to ‘commit’ ourselves to never do those things and save yourself for your temple married spouse. Then to ‘transform’ any thought you have or anything you are doing to make it pure. If you have a bad thought then transform it to a good one, if you have bad media change it etc. The last one is to ‘rehearse’ what you would do in a bad situation. If you have already thought about what you would do then you will not fall into a bad situation. Rehearse before hand. So Commit, Transform, Rehearse. It liked it. Like the ctr of chastity. The temple president also talked about how marriage and parenthood is like a calling, you don’t run away from it. He said that you can’t become pure without jumping into the fire. I think they were emphasizing this because people here usually wait a long time until they are married. He said that marriage and parenthood puts skydiving, scubadiving, bull riding look like childs play. I thought that was a fun quote. Anywho speaking of marriage, (mawiage! Mawiage is what bwings us togeva today!) we are hoping that there will be another civil marriage down here very soon.
We are working on getting two people in Kade married who are currently living together…We will see if it works!
Man well after all that we were tired. Of course on Sunday we would go to Kade early in the morning so we can make it to church by 9. Then right after church the Terry’s picked us up and drove us back down to Asamankese so we could do a baptismal interview with Ich. Upon arrival Ich was nowhere to be found at the church! His phone was not picking either so we went on the hunt. We had the Terry’s drive us to his house. I knocked and no answer. We shouted and no answer. We then asked his neighbors if he was home and they said that he wasn’t. I then opened his house and and found him sleeping deeply with a pillow no his head. The guy is a deep sleeper. We plopped him out of his house and got him interviewed with a pillow line in his face haha. He felt so stupid that he slept through it. He promised never to disappoint us again. After that we ran over to some obscure village on our bicycles to meet some Nigerian members who had a referral for us.
We finally got there and they started cooking for us. Man we had crepes but with fish inside them and plantain and spinach. It totally rocked. The Nigerian food rocked! We met the referral and she seems sweet. She is 10 years old and lives with her family so we are going to teach the whole family. Yahoo! Man so after all that we finally did our weekly planning for this week. Both of us fell asleep during it with our church clothes on.
Oh here are some more cool stories for the week. A grandma in our branch just lost her granddaughter who is 3 years old. She died about 1 week ago. The branch and district presidents went and visited with her and arranged the funeral etc. We went there and talked with the grandma. We asked her how we could help and how she was doing. She said that she was fine because she understands the plan of salvation.
We then asked how her daughter, the mother of the recently deceased girl, was doing. She said that she was doing okay but wasn’t a member.
We sat down with the grandma and mother and taught her about the plan of salvation. The mother was very hmm changed, she seemed very happy when we were teaching her. She is pregnant with another baby right now and was comforted when we taught her about eternal families. We explained that her daughter has gone to Heaven. The mom was very happy and said, “so my daughter has gone straight to Jesus?” We answered, “yes.” The woman was very desirous to be able to live with her children forever and wanted us to come back everyday to teach her more. We then extended her a baptismal invitation and explained that baptism was the first step. She accepted. The grandma was very happy.
We should baptize her by the end of the month.
These last couple of weeks have been full of talk of life, new babies, death and the plan of salvation. I’m so glad that we have this knowledge. So glad that we are in the church with the keys and the power to bind on earth and to bind in heaven. When thinking about the plan of salvation, I kinda recognized that families are not only central to the plan but families ARE the plan. Man I’m glad to be a part of a family that will be with me for ETERNITY! Yahoo! Also I’m glad for the temple. The temple is the only way to go! Regardless what we have done in our lives or where we currently are, we can change and go to the temple to receive the blessings inside which include LIVING FOREVER WITH YOUR SPOUSE AND FAMILY. This is one of the greatest blessings ever. I have been praying for Britts little kumquat every night and asking for it to grow safely and correctly and to make sure that it is okay.
Well transfers are this Wednesday and Tuesday. We are not sure if anything is going to happen. We hope that we are going to get a set of 2 more missionaries here in Asamankese to help out with the work.
They just closed an area up here in the North and they might bring 2 more elders up here. Our apartment already has the bikes and stuff up here for them. I believe that us being able to only attend 1 building each week is slowing the work! For instance we can only really see our people once or twice each week. Boo! I hope they will bring 2 more missionaries here, it would help out a lot!
I heard that Elder Asiedu, our AP, is training next transfer. I hope they will stick him up here. We are all hoping for it!
Well all is well. Glad to hear you all had a very good new year.
Thanks tons mom for collecting all of my priceless stuff from my room and are categorizing it. MAN I hated losing the ¼ to 1/8 adapters, glad you found them. Thanks tons for the cool organization deelie.
Good new years resolution. Thank you so much.
My new years resolution was to keep a gratitude journal. I have been blessed with soo so so so so much and take it for granted. I have that little journal thingie dad gave me so I am going to keep track of the blessing I have and reflect upon it regularly.
Cool keep up the good work everybody.
Well I gotta run. Here are some photos you should enjoy!
Love you all so much!
Ellen's Baptism.
ROCKIN the chinese ripp-off sweet Fender, I mean FENDAR bass!
Esther, little Esther and Samuel. They will be baptized very soon. Their grandmother is a member.
Our district president and our Branch President. I love both of these guys.
