Payday!!

Hi Karie

Elder Nelson tells me that you make your own yoghurt.  Would you mind sharing your recipe with me.  I made one lot when we first arrived from some Greek yoghurt I bought in Kumasi.  It was good but the second batch I tried to  make was unsuccessful.  We only get milk powder and long life milk here.  If the ingredients you use would work with what we have I would love to try again.

We called in at the Elders apartment yesterday and there was Elder Nelson sitting on a little wooden seat with a bucket scrubbing his clothes.  He would be one of the cleanest and best presented missionaries in this mission.  You have brought him up well.  He is truly a wonderful missionary and has an excellent understanding of gospel principles and is very kind to everyone. 

Love

Sister Diane Wood

Elder and sister Wood Techiman Ghana- Senior Missionaries from New Zealand

Miracle on Delay

Dear America,

This Thursday, I got the most exciting news of my entire mission so far. Elder Antwi called me in the evening and told me. At least some abbreviated portion of this story should make its way into the ward newsletter if at all possible. I'll take this opportunity for a flashback:

When I was in Kronum with Elder Antwi, we met up with an investigator named Rebecca. She was a fourteen-year-old girl that we contacted on the street near the chapel. We invited her to come to church and she accepted. It was just one of those "you'd better take me seriously" days for Elder Antwi and I, so we made her look us in the eye and promise that she would come to church. She said she would. One day we saw her entering a house just a few doors down from the chapel. Sunday morning at 8:30, we were waiting for her just outside her house. She was so shocked to see us there. We waited for her to start getting ready, at which point we went to the chapel for sacrament meeting. About halfway through the meeting we noticed that she hadn't shown up. So we left the meeting and stood at her door until she got dressed and followed us to church. We made sure that she stayed the entire time. She told us later that that first time she came to church really affected her. She felt the Spirit very strongly and knew that there was something different about our church. We gave her a Lesson 1 pamphlet to read over as she was leaving the chapel.

Our next meeting happened to be while Elder Antwi was gone on exchange. I was with Elder Lawson. At this point, we were still convinced that she wasn't at all serious about learning the gospel. But when we asked her if she had read the pamphlet we gave her, she was able to give as a very detailed point-by-point summary of the Restoration that left us astonished. She had even answered all of the sample questions at the back. It was amazing. Nobody on my mission, before or since, has ever done that. We taught her all five of the missionary lessons within the first two weeks. She progressed incredibly quickly. We had her all prepped for her baptism. She was even interviewed for baptism, but her hopes were dashed as she learned about the Church's policy concerning minors. In order to be baptized at such a young age, an investigator needs to either (1) have a family member in the church, or (2) attend church meetings for at least six months. We tried to teach her family so that we could baptize her more quickly, but her family wasn't at all in a situation to accept the teachings. Her mother was disabled by a stroke some time ago, her father was a taxi driver who drank and smoked, her older sister had moved away and was living the party life, her younger sister was middle-school age with a free spirit, and she was left to try to hold her family together while she was still in JHS. She was devastated when she learned that she would have to wait for six months to be baptized. We did everything we possibly could to strengthen her, but she started dropping rapidly. We visited her constantly for four months, trying everything in our power to keep her firm in the gospel until she could be baptized. But she was weakening. She stopped attending church and was able to meet with us less and less. It hurt us to watch he falling. Only a little while before, she was the perfect investigator. We tried so much to help her, but eventually felt that we needed to drop her from our teaching pool. It was hard. We had put so much effort into her growth. We were able to see her on the day before we left Kronum, and she was asking some disappointing questions about basic things we had been teaching. That saddened us. She had fallen so far. We left with very, very little hope for her ever progressing. She had made her choice and used her agency as we all can. She had just made the wrong decision, unfortunately.

Fast forward. She's being interveiwed for her baptism. Here's what happened: her brother -- WHO WE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW EXISTED -- who has been missing for several years, came back. Surprise. Well apparently in his absence he met the missionaries and accepted the invitation to learn the gospel. He was baptized and made the decision to serve a mission. HE'S A RETURN MISSIONARY. And he's back from the dead. Her desire and the joy of the gospel have been re-ignited within her -- and now that she has a family member in the church, she can be baptized. And even better, he'll be a strength to her for the rest of her life.

Sometimes small miracles happen. And sometimes huge, earthshaking miracles happen. Like your brother coming back from the dead as a return missionary. I'm just so happy that everything is working out for her. And I'm grateful that I could be part of the preparation. No effort is wasted. Elder Antwi and I thought that we had spent four months focusing on a hopeless cause, but we couldn't have been further from the truth. We were paving the way for miracles to happen.

This week was Elder Khumalo's birthday, the biggest branch activity that I've ever seen, and a trip to Kintampo Falls as a zone. We sustained a functional Relief Society presidency on Sunday, which was a big step in the right direction. Life's pretty good.

Love,

Elder Nelson

Shout Out for BRAVE Senior Couples!!!

Hi Sister Nelson

I just want to let you know what a beautiful, exemplary missionary your son is. He is humble, unassuming and very kind. My husband and I truly enjoy him. We have been with him and his companion Elder Khumalo when they have been teaching,  and he is a very spiritually in tuned young man.

If he was my son I would be so very proud of him. I know we have to be aware of pride but he is just such a wonderful servant of the Lord. 

Regards Sister Diane Wood. 

That was from Sister Wood. The Woods are the senior couple here in Techiman. She has a blog at africanwoods.wordpress.com that she'll be posting on. I told her that you would probably enjoy looking at it from time to time.

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

Epic Ride

Dear America,

I've been able to do a lot of study this week from the first book of Nephi. Nephi is an interesting guy. Have you ever noticed how often he says something about how "the Lord had commanded me"? He's intensely focused on being obedient, even if he doesn't know why. One of the reasons he was able to stay so focused is because he always had Laman and Lemuel to remind him to be better. Just as their seed would eventually stir up his posterity to remembering the Lord, they were placed there to keep Nephi in check. Without their constant murmuring, I doubt that he would have had the strength necessary to do what was required of him.

We had an epic ride in a three-wheeled taxi this week. We also had a district activity last Mondaywhere everyone brought some common food of their country and sampled a little bit of everything. All of us enjoyed it a lot. Elder Lesh and I got together and found some real actual potatoes in the market. So we made fries and orange julius, true American dishes if there were any. They were a big hit, much to my surprise. Usually Africans are disgusted whenever I try to prepare anything remotely American for them. But everyone loved it and asked us to make more. Also present on the table were: coconut rice from Nigeria, cocoyam with kontombre and talapia from Ghana, chakalaka from South Africa, and scone-like fried dough from Zimbabwe (sorry, I forgot the name). It was a lot of fun and everyone was able to enjoy something.

I was going to send pictures today.....and a longer email. But apparently my card got a virus from one of these computers and it has erased all of my stuff. So that sucks. I've been trying to fix it, so sorry the email is so short and picture-less this week.

Elder Nelson

Dear America,

Well, this week wasn't very eventful at all. Elder Khumalo was feeling pretty sick this week, so we went in to get a malaria test. He doesn't have malaria. But we were still cooped up in the apartment for several days. With nothing else to do, I started to get bored. Besides a lot of scripture study, I made yam fries that weren't very good. Potatoes are pretty expensive here, and yam apparently doesn't make a great substitute.

The other companionship bought a set of ping-pong paddles with a net while they were in the market, so we fashioned our own ping-pong table. That has been fun. Elder Waihi has claim on the "#1 CHAMPION" paddle right now, but I'm working on beating him.

On Saturday we invited the senior couples over to have lunch. Elder and Sister Wood are a new couple fresh out of the MTC. They're from New Zealand and they have that new missionary spirit. They're a lot of fun to be around. The Wardles were also in Techiman for the last time, so they came, too. We made pancakes for them with a choice of maple or strawberry syrup, fruit juice, and ice cream for dessert. It was nice. Nobody ever invites the senior couples for lunch, so they were really surprised and happy. We ate on Spider-Man paper plates. It was a party.

I helped an investigator make abutsie one day. Abutsie is like banku or Tzet, but it is only made with cassava flour. I'm getting a lot better at stirring the pots on the fire. It was really hot, though, so a combination of the sun and the fire left me drenched in sweat by the time I was finished.

Sorry, it was a pretty boring week in general.

Elder Nelson

Dear America,

On Monday we had FHE with a family in the branch and we played "face-biscuit" with them. It turns out that I'm pretty much a pro at moving a biscuit from my forehead to my mouth.

We made a lot of food as an apartment this week, including but not limited to: stew for the whole week, jollof rice to feed the sister missionaries, pancakes for Elder Prior's birthday, and ampesi after church. It all turned out really well. We were also invited over for sloppy joes at the senior couple's apartment. Which was fantastic.

During personal study, I had the chance to watch an old BYU devotional by Brad Wilcox titled "His Grace is Sufficient". It was really good. In it, he made the analogy that the Atonement is similar to a mother buying piano lessons for her child. The lessons are paid for. The child is asked to practice. Practicing does not pay for the lessons at all; it doesn't reimburse the mother at all. Practice only helps the child take full advantage of the opportunity to learn and grow. Christ has paid the debt to justice, it's just up to us to allow that to work a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, so that we can become the best "pianists" possible. Elder Neville shared this same analogy with me years ago, but I forgot about the details until now.

Speaking of piano, Lora Gunderson was right. I'm a music snob. I still am. Techiman zone has been working to prepare a musical number for the upcoming mission tour, and that's been getting me worked up. Especially last Tuesday. By the time we finished practicing, I was angry. I wanted to have some words with Elder Khumalo and let him know that he had no idea what he was doing. But through no small amount of self-control, I convinced myself to wait a few days to think about things. I remember that Elder Antwi taught me that we need to reprove betimes with sharpness, but we don't have to do it immediately. It needs to be the right time and place. I held onto that advice as tightly as I could. A month ago, I wouldn't have hesitated to give him some fire. But the Lord helped me as I took some time to cool down and think about things. That was a good decision. I was able to discuss the situation nicely and I learned a lot from Elder Khumalo about being considerate and working with people. That's one of his strengths. This is why we have companions--to keep our weaknesses in check.

This week we baptised a man named Francis. I think he'll be a strength to the Church here in Dwumoh. We've been working closely with the second counselor in the branch presidency because we don't have a branch mission leader yet. The whole branch presidency seems to be catching a better understanding of what the Church is like. It's slow but steady. We were even able to go on a walk with the second counselor's wife today. She's blind, so she doesn't get out much. It was fun to have her talking and going places with us.

I've been managing my sub really easily these days. We're supposed to use about 80 cedis every week, and I ended last week with 55 cedis left over. Soooooo I'm gonna have to buy more American food or something.

Elder Nelson