Hello everyone,
This past week was powerful to say the least and the Lord is pouring down His blessings upon these areas we cover in Welkom and Phahamang. We currently have 3 young women between the ages of 17 and 18 (all referrals from the branch) in Phahamang ready to be baptized on July 14th. We just started teaching all 3 of them about a month ago. They are all progressing very well and it will be exciting to see them all baptized together. Phahamang has its struggles when it comes to finding investigators but we are starting to find some great people there.
As for Welkom we did a lot of good ol' knocking on doors this week. Welkom is a little more difficult area because it's mixed with races and people are richer there. We were able to find some really cool people through finding this week and I've never found that many new investigators my entire mission. We found one family of 6 and another family of 4, including a few other individuals. The family of 6 consists of a mother and mostly daughters and we have had 2 good lessons with them so far.
We also found an Afrikaaner named I_____who invited us back. Now when it comes to knocking on an Afrikaans door it is often pretty difficult to get a return appointment. I_____ is the first Afrikaans person I have ever gotten a return appointment with on my entire mission. We came back on Sunday and had a lesson with him, his brother, his cousin and his girlfriend. They are all between the ages of 18 and 30. We had a great lesson with them and helped answer some of their classes with regards to life after death. They have potential to progress and it was the first white family I've taught since I've been in South Africa.
Now the cool story of the week was this family of 4 (N____ family) we found in Welkom. My companion and I have specifically been praying and fasting to be able to find a father led family. The Welkom branch only needs 1 or 2 more active priesthood holders to become a ward. We were doing tracting on Wednesday night. We approached a door and found no one home. As we were leaving a car pulled up to the house. A father jumped out with his 2 sons and greeted us in Zulu. It was weird to hear Zulu because this is a Sotho area and there are pretty much no Zulus living here. We greeted him back and he invited us in. He was so happy and willing to let us in. He sat down with us and said: "So gentlemen what school do you go to and how can I donate?" Haha he thought we were school children, not too uncommon I guess.
Well we explained that we are missionaries and started helping to answer his questions. He hasn't attended church in years because of the politics within churches and the pastors becoming very rich. Then he asked us: "What makes your church different from all the hundreds of churches here?" We began to go into the restoration and we eventually got to Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. After explaining the entire restoration, he said that he could tell something is different here. Then he asked us if we have a website. He got his laptop (pretty rare to see that here...) and pulled up mormon.org. We watched some Mormon messages with him and even got onto the topic of temples. All of this happened in the very first visit with him! We ended up being with him for 2 hours. As we were leaving and telling him thanks for his time he replied: "No, thank you to you guys for opening my eyes." Wow, the Lord was preparing this guy. We will see what happens but we think he has a ton of potential, future bishop!
The Lord is preparing His children to receive the restored gospel and the work is progressing. We currently have a ton of people progressing at the moment and we will hope to see some of them entering the waters of baptism very soon.
Love you all,
Elder Summers
No comments:
Post a Comment