Elder Ryland Earl Rash: Week 24: Miracles happening everyday!

Hello family and friends!!!

This week has flown by and has been absolutely packed with hard work, great families, and miracles! So let be start by telling you how blessed this area is! This area is definitely choice of the Lord. In one single neighborhood, we have 8 investigating families that are SUPER awesome! 3 of these families are already married, by the end of this week, hopefully all of them will have a baptismal date, we already have 3 of these families with a baptismal date, in total we have 16 investigators with a baptismal date marked, and by the end of the week,that number should double!!!!!!!!! I am absolutely LOVING how the work is going! With one of these families, while Elder Watteyne and I were on a division, he and I visited them for the first time. This man, Peter, is 60 years old, runs about 10 miles every morning, owns 2 houses, has 8 kids, LOVES his wife with all his heart, and they are so humble and prepared by the Lord. Well in our lesson we taught the Restoration. During the lesson we had wanted to read James 1:5. When we brought it up, the wife pretty much quoted it to us! She told us that in her Bible class that morning, they had studied that exact scripture in depth. She told us that she had Bible study class at 10 o'clock that morning! Even weirder, it was exactly at 10 o'clock that Elder Watteyne and I were preparing for that lesson. We had wanted to prepare especially for this lesson because I knew how much potential this family had. I learned from this experience that as you really prepare spiritually for your investigators, the Lord prepares them for you. That lesson we extended the Baptismal Invitation and they accepted! We did not give a date, but you better believe that they will have one by the end of the week. They are already married, and are just so awesome!!!

Another Miracle this week happened. We have been challenged by President Koch to baptize a family and reactivate a family before the end of the year. We had to drop the family that we were planning on baptizing before the end of the year, because they just stopped progressing, and we haven't been able to find any inactive families in our area. So we have been praying really hard and exercising a lot of faith in order to reach this goal. Well in the past 2 weeks, we've found those 8 families, 3 of which are already married, and an inactive family moved into our area from the other area!!! I know that the Lord hears and answers prayers! Also, thank you for all of your prayers on our behalf. But we sat down with this inactive family on Saturday night, and the next morning, THEY WERE AT CHURCH!!! BOOYAH!!! We're going to continue working with them and helping them out! They really love the missionaries and the gospel.

As for Church, we had Stake Conference this week (Yes mom, We did go) in Matola! So we all met at the church building in T-3, then took a massive bus together to get to Matola. We get going and then the bus breaks down. Great. We were already running behind schedule and we really didn't want to miss Stake Conference! Typically, you could be stranded on the side of the road for Hours! But another bus stopped and picked us all up only 5 minutes after we broke down!!! TENDER MERCIES!!! We got to the chapel with only 5 minutes to spare! BOOM!

Stake Conference started and they had been having some technical difficulties with the microphone. When the Stake President got up to announce the new Ward Boundaries, he said that because of technical difficulties, that we would have to reschedule the Stake Conference for another week. Mid-sentence, everything started working! TENDER MERCIES! BOOYAH! So he said "Nevermind", everyone laughed, and we continued on! So there were some big changes! We used to only have 3 Wards in the Matola area, but Matola 2 Ward had gotten big enough to divide, that they realigned the boundaries and created another Ward! So now there is the Matola Ward, Liberdade Ward, Mozal Ward, and T-3 Ward! Our Proselyting area stayed the same, but the Ward got a tad bit smaller and we lost our Bishop. We don't know who the next Bishop is, but I'll let you know next week.

That is all that I've got for this week. I know that God is watching over His missionaries. I have seen so many tender mercies of the Lord this week. I know God lives. I know He loves us.

Ate a Próxima!

Elder Rash