"Ye who do God's work receive God's pay"

Dear America,

It's getting close to Christmas. We've gotten free meals several times this week, including the ward party on Friday and two (huge) meals on Sunday evening. This week's fun foods include goat intestine at the bishop's house. It's good meat, with a nice flavor. I enjoyed it. But it looks like and has the surface texture of a towel. In fact, the Fante call it "towel". It's all bumpy like that. I also got to have part of a goat heart at the ward party, which wasn't too bad. I'm getting used to eating anything without question. Probably the hardest one this week was the fish head that was looking back at me while I ate it. And it was big. And it was good, if not creepy. I can honestly say that it tasted better than the rest of the fish. There are less little bones to chew.

Starting on that great note, I'm enjoying myself. Being a missionary isn't easy, but it is divine. I've really seen the Lord helping us this week. It reminds me that "Ye who do God's work receive God's pay". I've been using strength all week that is not my own. It's fun to work hard, even though the blessings I've been seeing aren't really direct results of my work. I try really hard to do my best, and something amazing happens that I have no responsibility for. So it makes my work feel useless but my faith all the more important.

Investigators here suck at progressing. The ones that are moving towards baptism come to us already prepared. Let me tell you a little about Kwasi, a man that we met with just this morning. He had avoided and avoided the missionaries while he lived in Accra. All of his family is SDA (I strongly strongly dislike this church). He kind of became less active SDA when he moved to Kumasi and his wife let the missionaries into the house. He came home to them teaching her. He was interested, and became a powerful investigator. He's smart and asks very good questions. Like questions that a long-time church member still wonders about. This morning, we explained about the Abrahamic covenant, patriarchal blessings, and that LDS doesn't stand for the Church of America. Which is something that is hard, because it pretty much is. Haha I'm joking. But he wants to learn everything about the church that he can before he joins because when his family finds out, they're going to attack him for it. And he wants to be able to defend himself and teach them. They already want their oldest son to serve a mission. He is about 16 years old.

A lot of investigators showed up at the ward party (where I ate the goat heart). Everyone loves a good party at the end of the year here, even though a lot of people don't actually celebrate Christmas (refer to where I said I dislike the SDA church). So we were able to get the ball of member friendshipping rolling. Happy day. I really enjoy working with young men, because I feel like I understand them a little better.

Thanks to everyone for their emails! You're all doing great, including Pace for giving the talk on Sunday.

Best Christmas wishes,

Elder Nelson