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Dear Family & Friends,
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| Elder Lambson and Elder Pohlsander "weeding" the Wellington's yard with their cutlass'. |
This week started out with us
going to the Wellington family and weeding their compound. I don't know if I
have explained it very well in other emails but weeding consists of wielding a
machete and swiping the blade parallel to the ground. Lawn mowers and
weed-whackers aren't really common tools, so the alternative is used, and it
feels pretty dope. Most weeds here could probably swallow a small dog or child
and so I don't think that lawn mowers and weed eaters would really do the trick
anyway. So we walked over to the Wellington's house carrying our machete's (we
call them cutlasses) and a lot of people were really upset about it. Usually
you wrap them up in some sort of a cloth just to show that you aren't going to
kill somebody. At first I was a little annoyed that people couldn't just leave
us alone, but then I thought about how uneasy I would be if some foreigner
was walking around my neighborhood carrying a gun or something. Sometimes you
just have to put things in perspective that helps in striving understand
cultural differences really well. We spent a good 3 hours hacking away at
weeds, Elder Pohlsander found a hidden tomato plant, and also barrel of random
belongings in the abandoned foundation of a house that we uncovered from the
weeds. Afterward Sis Wellington made us a heaping plate of rice and stew, and
it was awesome!
Good news! In a meeting with our
stake president I mentioned to him that I have never given a talk in sacrament
meeting my whole mission (Ya I know! How did I avoid that?), later after the
meeting I mentioned it to our bishop and I will be giving a talk on the 23rd of
this month in our missionary sacrament meeting. I guess that missionary
sacrament meeting used to be a pretty common thing in our ward, and I am trying
to get it going again cuz I think it will really help us find new people to
teach and get the ward motivated about missionary work. I don't know if I will
be assigned a subject, but I'm guessing I will probably talk on “missionary
work...” if any of you have any ideas that would be really helpful. I don't
want to pound the pulpit and demand referrals or anything like that, I would
rather like to show the members of our ward that if I take my tag off, I’m a
member just like you... even with my tag on I’m still a member of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I wanted to give them some insights into how
we do things as a mission and share with them some ideas of ways that I would
try to help the missionaries if I was a member in their ward. I think a lot of
them just have no idea what missionary work and missionary life is like and if
they had some insights, they would understand better and recognize ways they
can help more.
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| With George & Teresa Armah from the Mamponse Ward where Elder Peters started his mission. (too bad his eyes are closed, but we'll take any photos we can get!) |
On Tuesdays we have
meetings with the stake president to talk about how the missionary work in the
zone is going and the involvement of the members of the stake, particularly
bishops, ward mission leaders, and stuff like that. President Simpson has
decided that he would like to attend these meetings with us, which is really cool. Before
the meeting he told me that he wanted to do some interviews with 6 members of
our zone and also wanted to do an interview with me. He started the
interviews at 4 PM and they were taking more time than planned, I was to be the
last one interviewed. We ran out of time and had to go to the stake president
meeting but after the meeting was over I asked President if could still do my
interview? He spent a
solid 50 min with me and we just had a really good talk and it made such a huge
difference to have him understand and know what was happening in our zone! That that was a really high point of my
week.
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| Elder Peters "blending in" with the Ghanaian members at their area conference. He doesn't stand out at all... |
We started teaching this woman
named "Mame" Grace. She is a shop woman who lives in Chokor. We started teaching
the Restoration and I had a really cool insight. I have decided to try to teach
people more about our relationship with God as his child to help them better
understand why we go to church. A lot of missionaries like to talk about how
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the only true church
and give a lot of reasons why. Most people don't really know why they go
to church. If I ask them, they usually say, "to worship God" that's
all fine and dandy, but how do we truly "worship" God? I like to open
up to the first page of the restoration pamphlet which shows a picture of
a father and a son. I ask: "what does this child do that makes
his father the happiest?" Usually they will say something along the
lines of, "Well, when he does what the father asks him to
do." I then point out that our relationship with God as our Father is no
different. "If ye love me keep my commandments" the purpose of church
is to help us make better decisions during the rest of the week, our life is
nothing but a series of choices. Do we really become better by going to church?
How could we do better? It then becomes a lot easier to explain promises like baptism,
the sacrament, and the reason for authority behind them. I tried this for the
first time with this woman, and it worked really well.
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| Writing their testimonies in a Book of Mormon that they are going to give to an investigator. |
General Conference was awesome.
I'm so lucky that I was in the city for it. Just to explain how conference went
for me, they had live broadcasts of some sessions at our stake center and we
watched the rebroadcasts of other sessions at different times during the day on
Sunday. I basically spent all of Sunday at our chapel watching General Conference.
It was really cool because we had an investigator named Jacob come to the
Saturday session and he wrote like 6 pages of questions in the back of Elder Pohlsanders
planner. He is progressing OK, the only problem is that he is almost always at
funerals on weekends and so it’s really difficult to convince him that his
greater priority is witnessing the sacrament and preparing for it. We will be
praying for him.
Just so you guys know, the guy
who gave the talk in priesthood meeting and talked a lot about saints in Ghana,
Legrand R. Curtis, used to be here in Ghana not to long ago. He was serving
here as the Area 70 and he left just this summer. Dad can you just tell them
what I told you in the email that I sent about him... I’m kinda pressed for
time.
(this is what he wrote to me about Elder Curtis' talk...)
I got to watch conference and was super pumped to hear
Legrand R. Curtis talk! He used to be the area 70 here for West Africa. I ran
into him all the time at the temple site. He even came to our sacrament meeting
a few times. He's a super sweet dude. Conference was awesome!
Missionary work is awesome!
Love, Elder Peters
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| "Reading the Book of Mormon is a great example of TRYING YOUR BEST." - Elder Gary E. Stevenson General Conference - Oct. 2016 |
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