The Last Conference

This week was a good week, we continued to teach Paul this week. We continued to teach him about the Restoration. We taught about Christ's ministry and how the Apostasy came about and helped him to understand that. Me and Elder Kapalanga have worked out a good dynamic of how to teach Paul. I would do my best to explain the concept as simple as possible, and Elder Kapalanga would explain it over again to cover the points that he may have not understood so well. Generally speaking, this has worked out well for us as at the end of it he could clearly understand the concept. However, I would prefer that Elder Kapalanga begins teaching in English, as he will need the practice and get familiar with teaching it in that way. Paul also told us something that really took me back. That Sunday he came to church, he WALKED all the way to church, which is a really far distance. It had to be close to 10km at least. It was that far. Sadly, he did not join us this last Sunday.

General Conference was AWESOME. I loved so many of the talks, such as Elder Durrant talking about 'ponderizing' the scriptures. I think that just focusing on understanding and memorizing one scripture every week is a great method, especially for me. I do not like memorizing as I feel rushed and pressured to memorize it in such a short time, but with 'ponderizing' the scriptures I have plenty of time to memorize a single passage of scripture. It's not something I will start doing right now, but something later when I come back home I think. I do hope that it will help me a lot spiritually. I also appreciated his more practical advice.

Also, I really enjoyed the testimonies borne by our new Apostles. Hearing them all bear the own testimonies allowed me to feel the spirit and know for myself that they were truly called of God to be his Apostles. I think each and every single one of them are powerful witnesses in their own way. I was sad though that they only got to bear their testimonies. I can't wait for next general conference now! I want to hear what they will speak about!

Some of our current apostles gave great talks as well. President Nelson's talk was very moving. It really shows that the church really draws strength from the women in the church. It's no wonder that these leaders of the church are who they are because of their wives.

I also liked Elder Bednar's talk. I thought it was a very moving tribute to all the leaders of the church that he has known that have since died. As he shared their (unknowingly) final testimonies, I could tell that the words they spoke were truly inspired, especially Elder L. Tom Perry's and Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin's talks. It is such a shame that we could not have such great leaders forever, but again I continue to find solace in the new apostles that we DO have.

President Monson's talk was heartbreaking to watch. He has gotten very old very fast, and I was very sad to see him begin to struggle to speak towards the end of his talk. I do hope that he will be blessed with improved health, but knowing the old age that he is at, I realize that he doesn't have much time left. I hope though that we will be blessed to hear from him a few more times though.

Elder Chola finished his mission yesterday. As I am writing this letter he is probably having his final interviews. Elder Chanza got transferred to a different area because of that, so me and Elder Kapalanga have ALL of Chilomoni to proselyte in, which will be great because it gives us much for flexibility to have people to visit and to teach. I'll be able to visit my old friend Albert again who stayed in Elder Chola's side of the area. His wife gave birth recently to a daughter and she's starting to settle down. Albert wants us to begin teaching his wife and hopefully baptize her. It would be great to set that in motion (at this point of my mission I won't be able to see any more baptisms for myself) and I would be more than happy to see Albert's family united by the restored gospel.

Hard to believe that it will be a very short time before I see you all again. I look forward to seeing you again in just a few more weeks!

 

Love,

Elder Massey

Small Miracles

Zone Conference

This week was a week of small miracles (and apparently small letters...). This week by far was one of my better weeks as of late.

The big miracle was that we finally found an investigator to teach. The week before we contacted a man named Paul who seemed really interested in learning from us. We followed up this last week and to our great pleasure he was very serious about learning from us. Right off the bat he expressed his desire to join our church. He even invited a friend named Amos to join in the lesson, and he wanted to join too so we invited them to be baptized, provided if they come to know the church is true. We explained the conditions of baptism so that they could understand the sacredness of it and know that it's not just an instant win at salvation. We had a wonderful lesson with them and we had another visit with Paul to begin teaching the Restoration to him. To top it all off, he came to church yesterday! 

Better yet, we've been receiving referrals from the missionaries in our District and we have yet to meet them in person, but I'm really hoping that they are good leads. We may be teaching several people by the end of this week!

During this week we also worked with the branch and visited members in a part of Blantyre called Mbeyani for their Mother's Day. They have Mother's Day at this time of the year, so this was the day where we spent time visiting the families there, sharing scriptures and singing together.

Hoping that things continue to shape up for us. Looking forward to writing you all again!

 

Love, 

Elder Massey

Having fun in Blantyre!

The Last Zone Conference

Well, this was a big week for me! This week I had my last ever Zone
Conference for my Mission. It was a very big one too. President
Erikson made some reflections on his time as Mission President, as
he's coming down the final leg of his mission as well. He told us of
the vision that he had for the mission. I'm probably not supposed to
mention what's going to happen, but safe to say we may be seeing big
things in the next couple of years for the Church in Malawi.

The big focus of the Zone Conference was finding not through tracting,
but by other means. He knows just as well as any other missionary that
tracting is the least productive thing to do in missionary work, and
he wants it to be a mission goal to have no tracting in November and
heading forward into the future. As such, the whole Zone Conference
was dedicated to using alternative finding efforts and getting the
members to be more involved in the work. The latter was an especially
big focus as members really are the best way to get people taught and
be baptized.

We were fed a wonderful lunch. They made us Sloppy Joes (which were
the BEST) and gave us cookies and ice cream as a treat. I took
advantage and make an ice-cream cookie sandwich out of mine!

I apologize, but that's really all for this week. I promise I'll make
it up with a better letter next week.

Love

Elder Massey 

In Humility

It was another one of those slow weeks, but I'm getting by bit by bit.

Something big that happened this week was that a notable wife to one of the leaders of the church here in Blantyre had passed away. She was 30 years old, which is actually roughly the age where a lot of people can die here in Malawi. We were informed of it by Elder Beal while we were having District Meeting, and we were allowed to attend the funeral if we wished.

This was the first ever 'African' funeral that I've attended. I wouldn't say it was much of a funeral as much as it was a burial event. People from all over the community and many members gathered at the funeral. A rough estimation would put about 300 people at the funeral, women mostly. 

Everyone gathered at the home first. The casket was inside the house. There was obviously not enough space to fit 300 people in a tiny house that was roughly a little larger than an average classroom back home. There were many people sitting outside the house and had gathered by the road and houses that were alongside it.

Some of the women who were members sang a wide variety of Hymns. It was really whatever ones they wanted to sing, but they sang beautifully. All of us missionaries that were present were asked to join in the singing for a bit. I will be honest here and say that as I was singing with these wonderful members, I felt pretty sad that I'll be leaving all of them behind someday.

After some time just singing, the program for the burial began. All of it was spoken in Chichewa, so I didn't catch a single thing they said. It seemed to be mostly about logistics, but President Mtale of our District Presidency had the chance to speak, and he shared a scripture from the Book of Mormon which I felt was a wonderful missionary opportunity on his part.

There was a funeral procession to where the member was being buried. People piled on to trucks and in cars and drove together to the burial site. There wasn't enough space to fit everyone in vehicles, so many walked to the burial site including us. There they had close family members and friends lay flowers and wreaths on the grave. Even the Relief Society had a hand in it.

I continue to learn much from the challenges I'm experiencing on my mission. Something that I've learned looking back on it is humility. I've realized that I have many human weaknesses as a person, and they've been made strongly manifest in these current experiences that I've been having, and those weaknesses have been somewhat discouraging to me at times, even though I really want to do my best to serve the Lord.

I was doing a personal study of the Book of Mormon one day, and I came across Ether 12:27. It was one of those experiences you hear of where it seems like God is speaking right to you through the scriptures. It is Jesus Christ speaking in the verse and he says that he gives men weaknesses that they may be humble, and if they do realize their weaknesses and come unto him, he will make them be strong in those things that they are weak in. It was a really encouraging scripture to me. Things haven't magically improved right after that, but it's the little bits that eventually make a difference over time. That's kind of all that I have to say for today.

Hoping all is well with you all!

Elder Massey

 

(I''ve been asking for pictures of Mark and his companion....this was what he had to offer...of course they are eating!   Elder Kapalanga is the one on the right in the first picture!)

Lessons I've Learned this Week

Today, I just wanted to share a couple of things that I've learned this week. They were probably the more profound moments of the week.

First of all, I want to talk about faith and trust.

One of my big struggles with training Elder Kapalanga is that fact that he hasn't gone through the MTC yet, so I feel very obligated to myself to literally drill everything into his head as possible and be the one that is demonstrating how everything is done, and then letting him observe. I realized though that by doing so, I was negating any opportunity for him to lead and to be able to try it out himself, and that's really the only real way (in my personal opinion) that one can really learn to become a better missionary, so one of the things that I worked on more this week was letting my companion take the lead in certain things.

By now, I've probably cemented into all of your heads right now that we are in the middle of a very extensive finding process right now. Literally the only thing that we can do is find. I realized that one of the ways I can help train my companion better is that if I let him try it out himself and apply himself to what's at hand. In this case, the only thing that there is that we can do to have him do that is take the lead in finding. I'm not going to lie, I took a little bit of faith on my part. I knew that with him being as a brand-new missionary, he does not have the experience of finding and talking to people. Adding to that, he is probably not used to listening to the promptings of the spirit when finding, and I knew that it was likely that he was going to make some mistakes here and there, but I decided to let him spread his wings a little bit and learn from trial and error by letting him lead in the tracting. He was the one that decided which direction to go and who to talk to. It wasn't absolutely perfect, but it definitely went better than expected. We talked to a couple of people here and there, and we even sat down for a lesson (though it did not go smoothly at all). I realized now that he's more able than I realize, and I need to trust him more in many aspects of missionary work.

The other thing I want to talk about today is prayer. As I've said in the past, my prayers have become more sincere and genuine. This week I continued in my effort.

After praying all this time though, I realized one night that all I was praying about was me, me, and me and about things that I wanted from God, but I hadn't really offered much thanks for anything that he had given me, so that same night I knelt down in prayer and just offered a prayer of thanksgiving. I did NOT ask anything of my Heavenly Father at all, but rather express my thanks to him for all the things that he has done for me in my life - or at least, the things I could think of that he had done for me at that time. It was definitely a good experience. I'm just too used for asking God of things when I've forgotten to thank him for all the things that he has already given me up to that point. I forget if someone said it once, or if it is just something that came into my mind, but I've realized that one of the greatest sins that we can make in life is that of ingratitude. We sometimes do not slow down and think how much God has done for us in our lives, and then we eventually forget about all those things that God has done in our lives. 

You see it happen over and over again in the Book of Mormon: God spares his chosen people from destruction, the people praise and love him and are prospered by him only to forget all of that in the space of just a few short years. I've just finished reading 4 Nephi and am into Mormon right now, and it's sad to see how blessed those people are turn from righteousness to wickedness because they have forgotten The Lord's hand in all the things that have happened to them. What's even worse is that in Mormon, God spares them a couple more times, but this time they don't even notice that it was him that saved them all along. It's sad. I realize though that those examples are me at times. One of the things I've hoped that I've learned in my Mission is to be more grateful for the things that I've received in life. I've got a long way to go to really by grateful in all things on a daily basis, but at least this mission has begun to set me in the right direction.

Miss you all as always. I should say one of the things that I'm grateful for is having you wonderful people as my friends and family. I think that's one of the things that I am grateful for most. It's one of the things that I miss the most, but I thank my God that in a short time I'll be able to be in your company again. There's nothing in the world that I want to have more right now than being able to be together again this coming Christmas season. God bless you all, and have a great week!

 

Love,

Elder Massey

The Elder's New Clothes (and haircut...)

I honestly don't know what to write for this week. This week has been another rough one so to speak. We were juggling our own area with Elder Slade's for half of the week until he got his companion, so we hadn't had a full week in our area... again.

That said, we had a good lesson in Elder Slade's area. We were teaching this young brother of a member. His name is Chisomo. He's only about 9 years old. If I'm correct, most if not all of the family are members of the church, but they hadn't got him baptized when he turned 8, so it was Elder Slade's job now to teach him the missionary lessons so he can get baptized. It was a great lesson. It really put me to the test. I'm used to teaching adults all the time, but rarely have I ever had to teach younger children, and when you teach such children, you really have to simplify things but still make sure that what you are teaching to them is especially profound to them. In this case, we taught Chisomo about him being a child of God, how he loves him and how he has given commandments to make him happy in his life. It was a really good lesson, and Elder Slade said after the lesson that he felt the spirit very strongly in that lesson.

We've continued to give service to Sister Khama this week. This week she finally began burning her bricks. One of the things she had us do was to move timber over to where they were burning the bricks. We're not just talking about small sticks, we were talking about BIG, BIG logs! We had to all work together to move them. For example, there was this one log that was way too big for all of us, so Elder Chola devised this clever idea of moving it. We got two smaller logs and put them under the log horizontally on both ends. We lifted together on these smaller logs and we were able to get it over to where we were going. We also moved bricks again, but this time the bricks were much much larger, almost the size of a shoebox! Surprisingly, they actually felt pretty light in the hands.

A cool thing that happened this week was that I unexpectedly got something from Lusaka. A while back I saw Elder Allred had something sent from Lusaka from a member of one of the wards I used to serve in. The member's name is Sister Mooto, (pronounced almost like Moto in Motorcycle) and she is a very skilled tailor. Anyways, Elder Allred had her make a chitengi hoodie using some nice material from Nigeria. It was finished after he left Lusaka, so it was sent to him when he was in Blantyre. I got to see it myself and it looked sick. I'm not one that really cares about clothes, but when I saw Elder Allred's African Hoodie I was like, "Fetch, I need to get one of these for myself!" so I sent a letter and some money to her via a trusted friend. Just this Saturday, I was given a grocery bag addressed to me that had something inside. I opened it, and to my surprise it was my own completed Chitengi hoodie! It looks sick! The sleeves are just a tad short, but apart from that I've fallen in love with this thing. I've sent some pictures of it along with some of my new haircut.

 

 

Training Elder Kapalanga has been going okay. He's slowly picking up things as we go along the way, but one of the challenging things in our area is that we hardly have anybody to teach, so it is hard for Elder Kapalanga to really put the principles that he has learned into practice. Likewise, finding has also been a pain. So far we've had no dice. This is one of the reasons why I don't like finding. It is long, slow and hard without the members helping us.

It is safe to say that this is one of my most humbling times on my mission. It's one of those moments in my mission that Heavenly Father has leaned in and said that it's time for me to straighten up. I've probably said it before, when things go well, my prayers slowly grow less and less sincere and become more rushed. It is when I face the most challenging trials in my mission where I begin to humble myself and offer up more genuine and sincere prayers. Saturday night was one of those nights. I was probably on my knees for a while just asking help from God. I've realized though that perhaps God is withholding divine assistance for a time to see how I respond to the challenges before me. He wants to see how I react. I suppose it is much like the situation that Job had. Job hit a really rough spell in his life and things really turned south. Regardless of that, he was still faithful to God, but God still waited to see how Job would persist in his trials. It was only after a while that God saw that Job truly had humbled himself and poured out blessings to him. Perhaps it is the same with me. I'll be frank though, I've got a long ways to go before I'm like Job. God has really magnified my weaknesses and I've seen how helpless I can really be without him. I'm not always perfect at doing what I'm supposed to be doing on mission, but it is my desire to do that which is right, and I pray that that desire can overpower my human weaknesses and help me to overcome the challenges that I am facing.

Wishing you all well!

 

Elder Massey

 

The Long Run

Well, I had a bit of a God-send this last week. Elder Slade (a missionary in my district) was told that he was going to train, but his companion isn't coming until this coming Wednesday. Not only that, but his companion at the time Elder Ouma honorably finished his mission and went home on Wednesday last week, so he had nobody to work with, so the Zone Leaders came by and dropped him off and we've been together all this time. I wouldn't say that things have improved much though. Both of our areas are struggling lately, and having to proselyting in both our own area and Elder Slade's area can be a bit of a hassle, but we are getting by for now. I'm just glad I've got a missionary like Elder Slade to give me a leg up when it comes to training Elder Kapalanga. This last Thursday we spent probably upwards of three hours doing weekly planning with him and explaining how it is done. Hoo boy was that a long process. A leader of the church (and I've forgotten their name) once said that we should teach not for understanding, but to teach so that it's impossible to misunderstand, so I think that's the theme and the principle of how I train. 

Life at the flat has been good though. Since Elder Slade is my Bawo buddy, we've been playing each other when we've had free time available at the flat. So far he still beats me most of the time, but I still manage to get a few wins here and there. One game I literally starved him out until he literally had nothing else to move with! I even played a round with Elder Chanza, Elder Chola's Malawian companion. Since Elder Chanza is a Malawian, he knows the game inside and out. He whooped me pretty good the first game, but on the second game I beat him handily, though I would say it was probably because of pure luck! His jaw was on the floor as I took out his whole front row in one move!  

Elder Slade has also been taught by the other Elders how to play Draft, which is more or less an advanced version of Checkers. I knew how to play Draft, so I humored him with a few rounds! Fortunately, I'm "smarter than the average [Elder]" when it comes to Draft. We've played several rounds and he's won only once, and only because of a technicality issue. ;) 

Enough of fun and games though. Rest assured we are still working hard when we are in the area, but I will say that the games have been a helpful stress killer. It really is the small things that can really make a difference.

In the area these last few days we've been visiting a member named Sister Banda. She's an older fellow, but very intelligent. She teaches the equivalent of High School level Social Studies, so she is very very smart. However like a lot of other people here she's diabetic. It seems like they don't get proper treatment to maintain their diabetes, so from time to time when their blood pressure begins to fluctuate they get really sick and at the very worst get hospitalized. Whenever somebody has that, people simply say that that person had "BP". Anyways, we've been visiting to make sure she's doing OK, and thankfully she has recovered very fast. President Mukonda had it when I was in Chainama, and he was in a really bad spell that took months for him to recover from, so I'm grateful that such wasn't the case with Sister Banda.

The other highlight of the week is that I got my missionary journal back! I had a journal that I had all the missionaries and members sign and write letters in, but I left it in Lusaka for some missionaries and members to sign when I got transferred to Lilongwe - which was like APRIL - and I hadn't heard about it since, but when Elder Hinckley my new Zone Leader came by he had the journal with him! Glad I have that back. It had all the contacts of the missionaries and members I wanted to keep in touch with! Better yet, I can now have other people sign it now.

That's pretty much my week. It's been slow, but I'm continuing to hope that things will shape up! Love ya!

Elder Massey