TESS

Dear America,

This week was pretty good.These past few weeks, I've been able to see a lot of my prayers answered. It's been amazing. I know that God really does care about us every day and Jesus Christ isn't waiting for us at the finish line with open arms. He's right beside us the entire way. And the Holy Ghost is one of the best friends that anyone can have. Everyone should take the opportunity to get to know them better.

I've been listening to the audio from General Conference while I work out. It's from that memory card that you mailed with the talks on it since we still have a while until we get the discs or the Liahona from the Church. So far, I've especially enjoyed a talk by Dieter F. Uchtdorf about repentance during the Sunday morning session. He mentioned the city of Dresden which was firebombed, destroyed, and rebuilt. That's neat because I played a song about it while I was in high school in wind ensemble with Mr. Sandford. So I totally knew what he was talking about. But he said something that caught my attention: "...But sometimes, I think we misunderstand obedience. We may see obedience as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end." I've been trying to better understand and apply the Christlike attribute of obedience this week, so that hit me hard. It reminded me of the phrase, "obedience to the unenforceable". I think I might've heard that in a different conference talk or even in a TED talk somewhere, but I can't remember. If I had gospel library I would search it. Oh well.

Our church services on Sundays just keep getting better. The branch is really improving quickly. On Sunday after church I had the interesting opportunity to attend a general worship service on the campus of Techiman Senior High School (TESS). It's mandatory for all of the students to attend, and we were meeting with a student there so we ended up being invited in. We sat in the back of hundreds of SS students all dressed in white and tried to go unnoticed. The service was full of drums and clapping and dancing and enthusiastic attempts at singing. We managed to go unnoticed until the very end, when we graciously declined the public invitation to stand up and preach. I had tried to keep my head down, but I guess I'm kind of like a walking flag. It was unavoidable. Anyways, it definitely gave me a lot of insight as to why investigators come to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and suddenly notice that they feel the Spirit there. It's no wonder they like the way we do things. We answer questions, discuss topics, invite the Spirit, and teach the truth. It was a neat experience, but I like our worship services better.

Another fun week being a missionary!

Elder Nelson