This was a fun week with our elders. Tomorrow night we will find out who is being transferred and who is staying here. They wanted to use their last preparation day together to do something fun with our district, so we went bowling. Elder Glenn and I were expecting the usual bowling alley, but this place does “Turkish bowling” or otherwise known as duck pin bowling. It’s a smaller and lighter ball and the pins are smaller too. The pins are held by strings for an easy reset. It’s a little different but just as fun. We played two games. Elder Falke won the first game with his “drop the ball with hardly any effort” technique. In the second game Elder Glenn beat Elder Meyring by three points. We treated them to a A&W lunch afterwards. At the end of the week, in our last district meeting of this transfer we lined up for a last picture together.
The elders are finishing out the transfer with a baptism of two people this week. One lady, Nasha, is from Congo. She has four children and a new baby. She was going to be baptized in January, but she went into labor and had her baby premature. All is good now and she and the kids have been coming to church. Her eldest son, Ryan, about 13, is a very thoughtful young man who comes to youth activities. He is thinking about baptism very seriously. He was also very impressed with the FamilySearch app that we shared with him at the young men’s activity this week. I have the feeling that he will be baptized too and will be a very faithful person in the church. Nasha told us today that she is really ready to be baptized and feels calm and happy. She took great delight in the Sunday School lesson taught by Bro. Morais who is an excellent teacher.
The other person being baptized is a girl that we really don’t know. The missionaries have been teaching her for a long time though. A third baptism is coming up the week after for a man who is deaf. There is a sister in our ward who does sign language at Sunday meetings. We also enjoyed seeing a family that we have visited and encouraged to come to church again. They came today and stayed the second hour and put their kids in the primary and promised to come every week again. It feels like everyone is a little affected by the spring-like weather by coming out more with a cheerful attitude. It has been a long cold winter. The rain is now washing away the snow. I feel like we are clearing the way for a lovely Easter next month. I love the message by Elder Oaks about making Easter a more sacred event in our lives and creating our own family traditions connected with it. We are so looking forward to this next General Conference as we review the messages from last October.
I think I might have more pictures than words this week, but it has been a fun week in our district and ward. On Saturday I went to a stake wide Relief Society event. It was a nice gathering with some inspirational talks, lunch and a service activity. I helped with a yarn project to make yarn wigs for kids in children’s hospitals. We all crowded together for a stake RS picture, this being a really good turnout for the event. I think the rest of the pictures are pretty self-explanatory. Looking forward to some new changes after this week.
Au revoir,
The Glenns