May 14, 2007

Mulishani emkwai!

Well, happy mother's day to all the mothers who are reading this! Especially my mother and also Grandma Shirley and Grandma Jan! Without you I wouldn't be here for sure!
Another week gone again. Elder Collins and I had a good last few days together. He left Wednesday night so I was companions with Wesley Nzima for a day and a half until Elder Weeks arrived on Friday afternoon. Wow, I'm going to miss Elder Collins. He was only here for a short time, but we got a lot of things done and we had a good time together. Hopefully I'll see him again before he goes home. So Friday the zone leaders came and dropped Elder Weeks off here and then we had our weekly devotional that night at the Phiris' house. Quite a few more people showed up this time (this was only our 2nd week), but everyone was late so we didn't start until 6:30 or so. We decided that every week we'll go over a couple pages from the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet so this time we talked about Agency & Accountability and Gratitude. It went nicely, but we ended too late to play a game with everyone, so we just went home

Elder Weeks is much different than Elder Collins and Elder Minch. He is definitely committed to obedience, hard work, and talking to absolutely everyone! He is from Paradise, UT (in Cache Valley) and his family is full of berry farmers, so he knows how to work. He's the 7th in his family to serve a mission. I think we'll work well together. It's so interesting to me how different missionaries have completely different styles of working. He has a strong testimony that has been through a lot of trials, I can already tell. He loves bearing his testimony and did so in sacrament meeting yesterday. It was powerful.

Church was pretty good yesterday. There was a sister missionary serving from this branch who just barely arrived back home from 18 months in the South Africa Durban mission. Her name is Maria N'gambi and she bore a really good testimony in sacrament meeting. She'll really be a strength to the branch. Her brother, Aaron N'gambi is actually serving in this mission (Zimbabwe Harare) and has been out for 16 or 17 months now. Another sister from the branch, Sister Irene Chimfwembe received her mission call to the ZHM yesterday as well. She will be going to the MTC in July sometime and she is so excited! It was really cool to talk to her about her plans and everything for mission. I guess the only downer of this week was investigators at sacrament meeting. We have 6 with baptismal dates and only two showed up to church. We'll have to work on that during this week.

Of course, after church it was very very nice to call and speak with my family in Texas! I love my family! That's one thing I don't think I could ever be grateful enough for: a loving family who is strong in the gospel and who supports and prays for me. I can truly feel the prayers of my family and friends helping me here. This is one work that would be absolutely impossible were it not being guided by the Lord Himself. That's one thing I've really realized since I've been here. This Church honestly could not even function the way it is functioning if it was being run by men and their own minds and wisdom. It just couldn't. Jesus Christ is the head of this Church. There is no one else who has wisdom enough to do it. I was talking to a man the other day and I told him that we have a living prophet and he said, "Oh, I understand the name of the church then; the Church is run by Jesus Christ! That is cool!" Haha. Anyway, I love this gospel and I love my family and I love our living prophet today! He is truly inspired by God and it's a privilege to be a minister of that truth!

I love all of you!
Elder Molinator

P.S. Dad, I'll answer your questions next week. I'm going to think about them first. Also, computer was being slow. No pictures.