Double Dippin'

In terms of missionary work this week. I t was a lot slower today than in the past couple of weeks. We had lessons, but we also had our fair share of fall-throughs. Also, given that we have been teaching Ackim so much lately, we have taught every lessons possible with an investigator. All that remained would be sharing some spiritual thoughts from the scriptures, and that's it.

It doesn't mean work was bad though. We had some really solid lessons.

First of all, the BIG BIG highlight of the week for lessons was that I got to teach my first real family in my whole mission, and it only took me 17 months to do that! By family, I'm talking about teaching the mother and father with the kids. This last week we began teaching the Tembo family. They are Presbyterians. It seems like that faith is a lot more dominant here in Malawi than in Zambia. Anyways, we were tracting the Sunday before, and we wound up contacting somebody who had been formerly taught by the missionaries. She was not interested, but at the same time we were contacting one of here relatives (which was Sister Tembo) who was interested in us having a return appointment. That first appointment, we taught Brother and Sister Tembo, and they warmly received us and accepted our invitation to come back and teach more. So towards the end of this last week, we visited them again, and we taught the family with some of their kids about part of the Restoration. We spent a long time teaching there. They had some really inspired questions, and we were able to answer for them those same questions. Brother Tembo really appreciated our visit and actually encouraged us to come at any time so that we could teach the children. The only catch was that he was hesitant about coming to church with us. He basically had commitments to keep at his own church, but he said that he would come NEXT week! Fingers crossed!

Also of note was a lesson we had with John this last week. We followed up on his experience of coming to church the Sunday before, and he really enjoyed it. He had some questions about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon heading into that Sunday, and given that the whole Sunday was going to focus on Joseph Smith and the  Book of Mormon, all of his questions were answered and then some! He was very satisfied because of that. Just goes to show how you really can receive personal revelation through church attendance! We've committed him to be baptized on May 19th but unfortunately he didn't come to church yesterday, so we were kinda bummed that he didn't show up. We want him to be attending church regularly before we get him baptized. He's planning to move to America later this year with his family (who live in the Congo) and where he'll be going has a decent presence of the church there, so we're hoping that if we get him baptized and active in the church, he'll be further strengthened by the members there.

Best of all though was the baptism of Ackim and Evelyn yesterday! It was a wonderful baptism. Both gave some really wonderful testimonies. Evelyn herself had to work especially hard to be ready for that baptism (She had come to church like 20 times!) so she really is enjoying the fruits of her labours. We won't be able to confirm them until May though because this coming weekend we will be watching General Conference. I'm super excited about that. After this Conference, I will only have ONE (!)  left on my mission! Hard to believe how fast the time goes by.

Loving life in my area. I guess I have been a little lazy about updating you guys about that. We are basically neighbors with the Zone Leaders (we live in the same compound) and we often chat with each other every so often after we've finished the day. They're awesome. Elder Chola - one of the Zone Leaders - is the best. He keeps talking about how he's excited for a talk called, "Why Marriage?" He's finishing his mission in November or so, so he's already thinking about the M-word! He's hilarious sometimes.

Got to go now. Lots to do again today. I'll just drop a line and say that last Monday we got to go to a small Wildlife Sanctuary in the heart of the city where they kept a couple of lions. One is too crippled to be released in the wild. The lioness is blind in one eye and is crippled in the hind legs, so it always walks like it has a bag o' bricks sitting on its hind. They are smaller than I expected to them to be, and when we saw them, they were acting an awful lot like house cats. They were brushing themselves against the fence and looked real happy. We were told it was feeding time. What a surprise!

Have a good day!

Elder Massey