Feasting On the Words of Christ

This is the planner cover I made for this transfer, "Feast on the words of Christ"

on Monday we had lunch with a recent convert in our ward from Suriname. He grew up deep in the Suriname jungle. His family grew a lot of their own food growing up, and they would fish in the jungle river nearby for their dinner a lot. He told us a story about how one time they killed a chicken for a party, and after they cut its head off, it flew away. 

His mother gave birth to 5 or 6 children by herself out there in the jungle. He talks all the time about how all the things in his life prepared him to recieve the gospel. Apparently he walked into the church building after a friend that was investigating reffered him and he said, "Aw, this is the place for me." And 27 days later he was baptized. He studies the gospel for 2 hours every morning and has been ever since he got his hands on a Book of Mormon. There are a ton of cool people in our ward here.

We have been struggling with finding long term investigators here recently. We have been finding a lot of cool people and teaching them the first lesson, but it seems after the first lesson they just want to do a private study of the Book of Mormon and are not really willing to meet any further. But we had a lesson this week with a guy named Antonio who I actually found as a potential 2 transfers ago. We just kept on trying back at his door, and in the end, he asked us if he could meet with us and talk about the Book of Mormon. He has been searching for the truth for 3 years now and has studyed the Bible with Jehovah´s and spent a long time trying to find the real church of Jesus Christ. He really liked the lesson, we invited him to hear more, and he said we could make more appointments. Two things that were really amazing was that he understood that there is an authority necessary to baptize. Most people just say that they are baptized and that they do religion their own way. Which is not really religion. Christ is more important than just a reminder to do good things every now and then. Also, he was really impressed that our church has no crosses or ornate sculpting, statues or windows. He liked how the church was a place of worship, not a museum. We taught him the lesson in the church. We are definately looking forward to teaching him more, he is a very special person. He wants to do an in depth study of the whole Book of Mormon.

Soccer P day: Me, Debloois, Meads, Knaupp, Van Fleet, Musgrave, Parker. Dearden is lying down

Also this week we cleaned our bikes really good. We got all of the gunk and grime off and it felt good to get greasy again. A family in the ward visited the american army base in Heerlen and brought us back some A&W root beer and Canada Dry ginger ale. You can not buy these things here. He was showing off some of the other things that he got to us pretty proudly. He got some irish spring bath soap, martinellis sparkling juice, Mrs Butterworths syrup, etc. He served a mission in the states so he used to enjoy these things too and was pretty excited.

Also, our biggest miracle of the week refers to an inactive family that I think I told you about. Elder Stanger and I kept on looking them up, and finally they invited us over for dinner. Both the parents are RM´s, and at dinner the mother looked through her mission stuff and felt her testimony again. Ever since, she has tried to come to church with her youngest daughter. She has been completely inactive for over 20 years now, and all it took was for her to read some of her memories of her mission to rekindle here faith. Anyway, this Sunday, she met with us and her daughter wants to take the lessons in preparation for baptism, and she wants to hear them again to start building her knowledge of gospel doctrines again. Nothing is more special than seeing these two people come back. There is really a different feeling talking to them than with other because you can feel something so special super strong around them.  

Other than that, we only met the drunkest man I have ever had the privilege of talking to the other day. Elder Knaupp boldly asked him how many beers he had drank and he asked us succesively how much coffee, tea, and water we had drunk, but we were fasting so we actually had not drunk anything that day. And also we scared this goose that tripped over his fellow sleeping goose and faceplanted. He let out a pathetic little whelp, and it was so perfect, I thought it was faked for a movie.