Dear family!

Well this week was crazy. It was full of people making decisions, some chose good and reaped the benefits while others chose bad and also faced the consequences. Everyone’s agency was highlighted. Now for all you non church jargon speakers, ‘Agency’ is the power given to all to make choices for themselves. Everyone has agency. We are free to choose for ourselves. This power to choose is called ‘agency.’

My first story about agency was on Wednesday. One of our candidates for baptism was interviewed last week for baptism and was eager to be a member of the church. This candidate has a wonderful little baby girl who looks exactly like her, except has baby chubby cheeks that need to be played with. (yes I played with her fat baby face cheeks, gotta get it in while you can before the cheeks start to dissipate and starts to lose the bulldog resemblance). Anywho, the baby receives child support from the father who comes every 2 months or so for a couple days. Now the candidate is not married to the father of her baby, they are not having a relationship. The candidate agreed to have the man live in a different house for the days he comes. Now when the man came he was not in agreement to sleeping at a different place, when she addressed this he threatened to not pay the child support etc. I visited the house with my companion and put on a smiley face and went to meet with the candidate and the man. I introduced myself and he was not enthused. We asked if we could share this message with him and know more about the church that our candidate was joining. He wouldn’t let us sit, even though it isn’t his house… so standing we tried to address the concerns and he said that “his organization would not let him believe such a thing as cohabitating being wrong.” In my mind I was thinking, “did Satan found your orginazation…oh wait...”

The man was just being hostile because he knows that the cohabitating is wrong. The guy hated us before we even went to meet him. We left him and I shook his hand. We talked to our candidate and told her that she could still be baptized if she didn’t sleep in the same house as him. Her mother stays in the next house and she agreed to sleep there until the father of her baby left. I called her the morning of her baptism and she said that he forced her to sleep in the same room and was not worthy to be baptized. I felt like poop.

Well she is not having a relationship with the man but still was cohabitating so we gotta wait for some long while before she can be baptized. Man it was really poopy.

Spent a split with Elder Farnbach this week. He is a hard working missionary. It is for sure we will be doing much sweating when we are companions. We don’t have to pull each other but both of us are running full speed with our feet in the work. He definitely gets it. I always love going on splits with him. We are connected on the mission, where he goes I’ll go - haha. We have been in the same place for over 13 months. It is great to have him around. Great friend.

The next instance of agency was on Saturday. We went on splits with the zone leaders because they had to do some interviews for us. The interviews were in Asamankese so Elder Farnbach came over to spend the night and my companion Elder Skepu went to stay in Abomosu. Well we were all going to meet in Kade as it is the middle location between Asamankese and Abomosu. Well we were having a baptism in Kade in the morning so after the baptism we were just going to meet up there and leave to do the work in our various areas. (Splits here are quite a choreography work of art, every time we split it involves at least 4 hours of tro-tro rides per person) So we arrived for the baptism in the morning, we were going to baptize Georgina Boadi, bro Afriyie’s wife. Brother Afriyie was baptized only a couple of weeks ago, he was given the Aaronic Priesthood last week so I invited him to baptize his wife. He was scared but accepted. He can’t read very strongly but I wrote down the words he had to say and he memorized them, he practiced baptizing me at his work (a little mechanic shop). All the muslims were watching us and laughing but we didn’t care. I thought it was interesting they were making fun of us when they all just got done praying on a mat with their foreheads on the ground while one guy was standing there yelling into a microphone connected to a big megaphone on top of the mosque so all can hear and know that they are praying and then they all grabbed tea kettles and pouring water on themselves and washing themselves. Did I point and mock them as they did this? No.

It reminded me of the tree of life story, they were laughing and scoffing from their great and spacious building with their megaphone atop of it while we were quietly teaching a brother how to excerise his priesthood calling. Bro Afriyie didn’t mind. Bro Afriyie also practiced baptizing his wife at home as well. She was very proud of him.

Well we came to the baptism only to find that nobody filled the font in spite of our coordination meeting assignments and my reminder calls the night prior. The branch president said he had to run to a meeting so he wanted to do the baptism later. HAH! So I taught him about if you blow it then you gotta deal with it, so he went and explained to bro and sis Afriyie what happened. We then decided that we could do the baptism at 4pm that night. So we all split with our new companions back to our different areas. Elder Farnbach and I interviewed our candidates with the Terry’s. THEN we took a tro tro back to Kade and bro Afriyie baptized his wife, got it right the first time! He did a great job. His wife then bore her testimony on how she knows that this is right and is going to work hard so she can read, speak and hear English (all of this was translated to us by a translator). His whole family is now baptized. I got the names of their deceased parents ready for them so they can do the names at the temple next week.

Kapow!

Then came Sunday. Elder Farnbach and I went to church and only about 7 people came. 3 people who promised were not there so we left the 2nd service after the sacrament in search of them. We found 2 of them. One of them at a barbering salon getting his hair cut. He felt really stupid and he said that he was so sorry and that he was coming right now to church. We went and found another one sleeping at home, I knocked and woke him up. He said that he just came back from another town. He could not comprehend that he made a prior commitment to come to church and that traveling and not coming was breaking that commitment. Elder Farnbach finally explained it to him well. He said that if you had lied to your parents as a child that they would beat you. Our investigator understood this well as this happens to them in Ghana. He said that God would not beat us directly after we make a mistake, and even though He will not beat us after we disappoint him we still need to keep our promises with him. I then grabbed my planner and showed him the 3 times our investigator promised to come to church. I then drew 3 lines and said that he came one time to church for half of it. I circled half of one line. I then explained that this was 1/6th of the times he said he would come that he came. He then said that he was sorry and he was coming right now. Well neither of them came to church. We tried to show our love and concern for them and made sure they knew we loved them. Still they did not come.

Another woman did not come after promising us that she would. I visited this woman every day last week because she was sick. I wrote her a note on her door when she failed our appointment showing our care for her and invited her to call us when she got home. We taught her 3 times, our members visited her and taught her. Then we passed by and she said that she was going to her church tomorrow because she was going to give the opening prayer. She explained that she was sick and they found a replacement but now that she was better she was going to go to her church and say the opening prayer. I felt like crying. I brought up all the things that the missionaries had done for her such as the missionaries washing clothes with her years ago without even teaching her, us visiting her everyday last week, us showing up when we said we would and leaving notes when she failed, calling her to see if she was alright etc. I asked her if we did anything wrong to offend her. She said that she knows that we love her and that we did everything right. We then asked her why she was not coming to see if this was true and why she would not keep her commitment that she and we wrote down and had reminded her about multiple times. She didn’t know what to say. I invited her to come and she said she would come after her prayer role. She didn’t show up either.

I felt like poop.

However one of our investigators called us on Sunday morning at 7 and sounded distressed and asked us to come over right away. We jumped up and ran out the door like minuete men. We ran up to his door and his wife handed me a tie and asked me to tie it for him as he didn’t know how. He was so happy and was dressed in a white shirt and slacks with suspenders. He came to church and kept his commitment and he met with our branch president and asked if we could baptize him that same day because he knows it is true. He was unsure before he came but as he came he knew it was true.
We see agency at work with everyone here. Some for keeping their commitments and the blessings of joy and happiness and finding complete goodness. We also see those who did not keep their commitments and it led them to shame, sadness, guilt, misery.

I was very upset and distraught with a lot of people and their decisions this week, however I could not be happier with our brothers who chose to do right. The joy from their success outdoes the poopy feelings I had from all the others. We will continue to help all of our people. I’m getting better at showing people that I am sad and devastated when they choose not to do what they say. At first I would just be like, ‘oh okay…’ then go into a corner into a little ball and cry. This does no good for anyone so now I let them know that they are not doing what is right and they can sense that their success really matters to me and they can see how sad I am because I want the best for them. I let them know that this is the only way back to God and they sense that.

I’m working on loving them back afterwards. I am trying really hard.

Well the water was off this week. We have been showering with well water and flushing the toilet using the well water. It is a pain and freaking freezing water. This morning and yesterday our neighbor with the well water bucket was gone so we showered with pure water sachets.

Terrible feeling - haha. Well we will try to figure it out. The mission home brought us a new polytank. Hopefully they will hook it up soon. I hope that the city turns the water back on soon.

Sweet barbecue ribs mom! Man I will absolutely love to learn how to make freaking awesome ribs. Big loads of meat sound great.

Well great puppy sitting. I gotta run. Love you all.

Yeah mom if you could send another sd card hidden in a cracker box and a card reader. LOVE YOU.

Thanks for the packages and letters coming!

I love you all so much.

Your son,

Elder Bills