Chrismasi Njema!
Hello everybody!!! I hope you all had a great week!
So we have some pretty huge
news! Our mission will be
losing all of the Oklahoma areas and stakes to the Oklahoma City Mission! So no more Tulsa or Bartlesville or
Tulsa East zones! But as a result
we won’t have to be covering any more double areas like we are right now! So in two weeks I will most likely be
going to a new apartment and only working in one ward! I am excited because sometimes it is
hard when you are spread so thin!
I love my new companion Elder
Strobel! He is from Idaho Falls, Idaho and we were in the MTC together and have been good friends since the
beginning of our missions!!!
We had the best Tender Mercy this week! Some awesome members, the Brazeals, snuck into our apartment while we were out and completely stocked our kitchen for us. Due to a weird situation, I was already out of money for the month and this was such a huge blessing to me!!!
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| The Brazeal brothers helping get the groceries. |
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| So much yummy food! |
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| What a blessing a full frig is! |
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| All the necessities! |
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| They even left a treat on my pillow! |
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| Elder Strobel's Pillow |
So a couple cool stories from the
week! The first was that lately I
have been praying and praying for a vision of how on earth we can teach these
Congolese refugees and how we can display our message to them. Well in my head I kept seeing these big
pictures that we could hold up as we read Swahili off the back of them and
explained the basic principles of the Restoration. Well I told my companion this and he instantly walked to the
library and showed me that the church has a ton of these big picture things
haha, so we went back and started working on our translation and then taped
them to the back of the pictures. Well considering my Swahili is very, very basic and I am still learning and my
companion had been studying it for 2 days and maybe a total of 1 hour in those
2 days I was a little nervous going in to teach our friends. When, we walked into the Bolenge home we
gave our message and it was choppy and sloppy but they understood exactly what
they needed to do and accepted the invitation to read and pray about the Book
of Mormon. We walked out a little
discouraged because we realized how hard it would be to really, really teach
them even though they are very prepared by the Lord. So our discouragement lead me to say well maybe we won’t
share the message with the rest of the families tonight but I will just ask
them how they are doing and what they need because that is about the extent of
my Swahili at this time. Well when
we walked into Sebastian's home, the next house on our schedule, and before we
could even really start talking he ran to his room and walked out with his Swahili
translated Restoration Pamphlet that was wrinkled and that he had obviously
been studying ever since we left it with him the first time we met with him 2
months ago. He sat down and
pointed at his pamphlet and said "teach me, teach me!" His son, Pascal was there as well who is
coming along very quickly with his English and could even basically translate
for us! But we gave our message in
Swahili and it was very smooth and we could even start to understand what they
were saying to us back and understand their questions. My favorite part was reading from Sebastian's
Swahili bible John 10:16 about Christ speaking of his other sheep. In this moment it all clicked in
Sebastian's head and he turned around and grabbed his Kitabu cha Mormoni and
gripped it so tight and held it in the air! He realized what we had brought him and the importance of it!
I love these people so much they
help me realize how important of a message I truly have! We continue to pray for the vision the
Lord has of how to teach these amazing people from the Congo!
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| The Sibbett family from Mena, was in Springfield dropping Larry off at the airport and took Mikey to dinner. He loves this family so much and they have helped him so much! |
Well that was so long it is about
time to go. We had another miracle that I have to
mention. One night our mission president told us to just
park our car and walk or go in for the night and call with the phone because
the roads were too icy. So we bundled up and set out on foot hoping to teach a couple
more people before the night was over. While walking to our investigators’ house we then realized
the length it really was and started to worry a little bit because it was
COLD!!! The coldest I have ever
felt in my life I think. We prayed
twice that somebody might pick us up. The next few cars drove by. It was dark outside, it was about 7:30 and I was freezing
haha. We saw another pair of
headlights go past us and I made some sarcastic comment, when Elder Strobel
was like, ”They stopped!” haha what a tender mercy it was that the Lord would
answer our prayers with these two guys turning around picking us up and driving
us to our next appointment!
We got to sit down with the Moi family this week a part-member family from
Samoa!!! That was sweet.
Well that’s all folks! Love you all hope your Christmas is
truly wonderful! I can’t wait to
talk to all my family!!!
I am in Alma in my Book of Mormon
reading and I read about the Anti-Nephi-Lehis and thought of how my mom loves
that story! I don’t know why I
remember her saying that but anyway here are some questions to ponder:
1. What "weapons"
(habits, sins, etc.) do you need to bury?
2. How deep will you bury them?
3. Will you dig them up when trials
arise?
Love you all! =)
