Howzit Fam!

Date:  May 9, 2016

Area:  Maseru, Lesotho
Companion:  Elder Woodland
Week 47

So this week seemed pretty chilled, We saw Nelson and his family like 4 times this week so that was cool, but we have run into a bit of a hiccup it seems. So because of tradition it can be hard to get married sometimes, you have to get it approved by the Elders of the family which sometimes live far away so you need to go see them. Then you have to have your traditional wedding which can take time and then you also have to pay labola, paying the family money so you can marry the girl. Its hectic and long and the cause for many people to just not get married at all. So we are still working with them to try and get it all sorted as fast as possible.

I had the wonderful chance to interview a young women for baptism. Her name is Liako and she is a student at the EMT class Elder Woodland and I teach at. She was interested in the gospel after a few lessons with her so we referred her to the other missionaries who work in her area. She has since then progressed so amazingly. She immediately stopped and broke old habits and hasn’t missed a day of church, she even skipped going to South Africa to shoot a music video so she could be at church. She is amazing! She gets baptized next week and it looks like I will be the one who will be blessed with walking into the freezing cold waters with her and I can't wait. It is when you see someone like her change so much and progress so far so quick that makes everything so worth it. I would gladly have 100 more rejections to find just one person! Whoo I am so excited!!!!!

We also had a nice DDM this week. I taught about unity and why and how. We also talked about how having unity with our companion isn’t just an option, it is a choice we made when we accepted our call to be a missionary. We played a game to test how well we knew our companions and that was fun, I think it went well and will be a lesson that they remember.

Another thought that I read about that keeps coming to my mind is how when we leave on mission we pack up our life and put it in the closet, now this is very literal for a lot of things, our cloths, or toys, our every possession in put into boxes and stored. We don’t only store material things though. We store our hobbies, our music, Movies,

Friends, and more. We pack them up and leave them behind for now. We don’t forget about them but we don’t pull them out of the boxes. Now when we come home from mission we see that some of the cloths don’t fit, or some we don’t want. The same applies to the other things we pack up, we may decide the music we listened to before is not what we want now, some of the friends we had before might not be what we need and our lives change, but after mission we unpack it all and we find a lot that we do keep and love still. The key is that we don’t unpack our bags on mission. I don’t know if this made sense or not, but it comes from an amazing talk called “the fourth missionary” and he does a better job at describing it.

https://annathemissionary.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/lawrence-corbridge-the-fourth-missionary.pdf

I have been blessed to be able to see the impact of the gospel on many peoples lives, including my own. I know that the spirit works through each of us as we give it place to. I know that God is waiting to answer us and probably already has, we just need to listen. He loves you! I love this gospel, I love everything about mission, I love these people, I love being able to serve my Lord and my God, I love the growth, I love the experience, I love the change, I love the hard work, I love the whole of it and it dosen't get much better than this. 

I love you! 

Elder North