Tuesday and Wednesday I was sick. I ate too much sugar and so my stomach was rumbly tumbly, but I'm doing much better.
On Thursday, President Nash and Elder Martinez had a conference with our mission. They are both from the area presidency of West Africa. The meeting was all about how the missionaries in my mission need to change. There's a lot of problems here with buying clothes with mission funds, not going out, and a lot of the rules and President Nash felt prompted to come to our mission and talk to us about it. I will share some of my favorite quotes from the meeting. The Spirit testified so strongly of what they were saying with how sacred this work is. They both spoke with such power and authority it felt at times that the room was shaking.
The quotes:
"If I sleep in one hour later, it shows that I love that one hour more than Jesus Christ, after all He has done."
"Can we invite others to change if we don't do the same? Can we invite others to be converted if we are not converted?"
"Satan only wants to damage your soul"
"You will be like a tomb, decorated on the outside, but only death and bones on the inside"
It was pretty awesome in the worst way possible.
Even after a meeting like that, not much has changed with the Elders in my apartment and with their choices. We all know things will change here though, we just struggle to be patient sometimes haha.
Elder Kadima and I have been able to do a lot of finding with some awesome members, like Frere Wonlé Thibaut, a returned missionary from Congo. He's helped us find people through others and just on the street too, so we have lots of leads going into this next week.
This week, we visited Soeur Veronique, a sister in one of our branches. We've been meaning to get out for a while and just did it on Friday. She has asked for pancakes, so I made some that morning and we brought it. I tied it into the gospel by talking about how to cook a pancake, if the heat is too high, it will burn, but if too low, it will never cook. It has to be just right to make the best pancake.
Life is hard. The flames are hot. We want no flame, but then how will be better? The flames are too hot for us, how do we turn them down? We don't. Christ does. When we turn to Christ, He turns downs the flames of life, so that God can help make us the best us we can be.
We shared this with Soeur Veronique and then talked a little bit before finding out that that morning she had learned that her little brother had passed away. We expressed our condolences, shared Romans 8:18 and of course we cried haha.
The gospel is true and Jesus Christ is as true, real, and living as ever.
Elder Brooks
Notes from our video call:
Jonah played the piano for the conference. After the meeting Pres. Nash thanked him and asked him if he had gotten it on target. It was very powerful! Jonah isn’t even buying clothes with mission funds and he feels like he needs to stop. They also interviewed some of the missionaries. Some of the interviews took 2 hours. Pres. Nash is going to be looking over the mission for the next 4-6 months. The mission is going to change, it’s just going to take some time. Nothing changed in their apartment after the conference.
One of the missionaries that stayed in their apartment for the Christmas conference gave Jonah a harmonica! His family had sent it to him but he gave it to Jonah because he isn't musical and didn't know what to do with it.
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