Week 83- It was a successful week.

" I'm so grateful to be in this area. Being here reminds me of one of my favorite scriptures in D&C 4: 'For behold the field is white already to harvest…' This is definitely an area which has been prepared by the Lord for his children to receive the gospel."

Amada família!!

Thanks for your email this week. I wish I could experience the cold weather that you guys have over there; here, it's just hot and extremely humid with tons of rain. But  this is normal for this time of year here in Mozambique.

It was another great week . We continue to find a lot of very nice people willing to spend time with us listening to our message. We are currently teaching about 12 families, and they're all making progress towards having their own witness of the Gospel.  Things continue to go very well here. I'm so grateful to be in this area. Being in this area reminds me of one of my favorite scriptures, D&C 4: "...the field is white, already to harvest…" This is definitely an area which has been prepared by the Lord for his children to receive the gospel.

We went out to a farther part of our area this week, an area called Madjimane (not sure of the spelling). It's past the Beira airport. Anyway, we found two good new families out there. 
On Wednesday, I worked with one of the members of my district, Elder Woolley, from Bountiful. He came in to the mission the same time as Elder Christiansen. He's a really funny guy; I enjoyed working with him for the day. I love my district, there are six elders in total: me, Elder Christiansen, Elder Woolley, Elder Brown (Provo), Elder Badger (Missouri), and Elder Azevedo (Recife, Brazil). Thursday was a day filled with lessons and contacting.

The other day at home, we had a fight with a family of rats. We discovered rats living in our couch in our front room and inside the stove. There were 8 of them in total. We took out the couches from the house and now we're getting rid of them so we can buy new ones. It was a pretty exciting adventure actually. We barricaded ourselves in the kitchen so the rats couldn't escape to other parts of the house. Then we carefully removed the back panel of the stove, in there we found a whole family of rats living inside. Then we hit the oven with a broom to scare the rats out, one by one, until we got rid of them all!  So now our house if rat free! I think we had that problem because when the church was in our house things got super cluttered and it was hard to keep the house really clean. But now that the church moved to its new location, we are taking back our house. It looks really nice now, there is so much more space and no more uninvited guests, haha.

On Saturday night we went back out to Madjimane, to teach a lesson to one of the new families. While we were there, towards the end of the lesson, it started to get windy outside, and really humid. 

All of a sudden it started pouring. It was raining so hard, water was coming down so fast and with so much force that it seemed it was harder than when the water comes out of the shower in full force. We decided to leave the area and go out into the rain and try to get home as soon as possible. When we got out there on the street, it was flash flooding, the roads were like small rivers. We waded our way through it and made out to the main road, once on the main road, we were lucky enough to get a free ride from someone all the way back to our house- I thank the Lord for sending the person who provided us with transportation. But we got completely soaked. I'm sure you remember me telling stories like this at the beginning of this year when it rained a lot in T3. It was pretty much the same thing. And it'll be like this for the next 3 months or so. But it's fine, there is nothing anyone can do, it's a normal part of being a missionary in Mozambique. 

One of families, decided that they will wait for January to be married and baptized, they found that this month was a little too soon because their families wouldn't be able to attend. So they moved the date to January 17th.  Our other family continues to move closer to baptism as well. They are still on track to get baptized on the 25th. They have a lot of faith.  They don't have much as far a material stuff, but they have so much faith that they are willing to make sacrifices to be able to get married and be baptized as quickly as possible and follow Christ. They are a very inspiring family, it’s a blessing to know them.  Their 8 year old son will also be baptized with them, he is way cool, and very smart. We have many other families that we are teaching that I have faith that most of them will join the church within the next two months of so.

Yesterday's church was great. It was the first time at our new location. A few people got confused with the change and came to our house. The new place is on the main road of the airport and is very visible from the road. So hopefully that will attract more people to come in and visit us on Sundays. We had 24 of our investigators there! That's the highest number I've ever had on my mission. And in total we had 126 people at church, also a record for our branch! The growth here has been amazing and as long as we keep working hard, with God's help, our numbers will continue to increase every week.

That was cool reading about all those missionaries who have recently returned. So many are coming home these days, it's crazy, the big rush that headed out 2 years ago with the age change is now starting to come back. I can't believe some of my high school friends are now getting back this month, like Bruce and others. This also means that my time continues to get shorter and shorter. Today I have 19 months on the mission; I can’t believe I only have like 4 1/2 left!!

Thanks for everything you do for me. I hope you're having a good and relaxing Christmas without too much stress. 
I can't wait to write to you again next Monday, and then we will Skype on Christmas Eve! Remember to keep warm! I will try to stay cool and dry here as best as I can

I love you sooo much and hope you have a good week

Love
Josh