Today we had an amazing sacrament meeting. Before our meeting I went to pick up one of our friends who has been taking the missionary lessons from our sisters. His name is Fongwan and he is from Cameroon in Africa. He and his wife have been very interested in the gospel since they arrived about three months ago. His wife, Sandra, had to work today and wasn’t able to come to church. They are desperately trying to get a good start in this country, but they are anxious that one of them can get a better job, so she doesn’t have to work on Sundays. This morning as I was driving Fongwan and his boys to church, he asked me how the process works for getting baptized. Of course, I told him that he had to let the sisters know if he was ready and that they would set it up. We are so excited that he is finally ready. He is very knowledgeable and humble. I know that their family will be a great asset to the branch here. I also shared with him some information that we just received about an apprenticeship opportunity in the area. He was so excited to hear about it and will definitely attend the zoom meeting next week. It seemed like a true blessing that he had been waiting for.
When we got to church, we were delighted to see our mission president, Pres. Sorenson and his wife there. They sometimes pop in to visit different wards and branches. We were able to introduce them to our friend, Fongwan, as well as a few other friends that our missionaries are teaching. Another surprise was that we had a visitor from Chili who was with his wife visiting his family in our branch. He was just released as a general authority last week after 17 years of serving. Their testimonies along with those of several others, including Pres. Sorensen’s, were just awesome. I couldn’t have asked for a better testimony meeting for our visiting friends. After the meeting several of us wanted to get a picture of Fongwan’s cute boys in their traditional African tunics. We will have to get another picture with Sandra too. She is a really beautiful person.
One of the testimonies borne today was from one of our sister missionaries, Sis. Hauata. She is from Tahiti and didn’t speak any English when she got here about 9 months ago. She is doing amazingly well with English now. She told an entire story of how her father survived a shark attack and became reactivated in the church after a healing blessing. We have just learned of a language program that the church is sponsoring through missionary work. It is called English Connect and it is meant to help missionaries who do not speak English, but who are called to serve in places where English is spoken. The idea is that these missionaries can go home with fluency in English and that helps them to be more successful in their career opportunities. English is the global language of success, and the church wants to help these future leaders to be successful in their home countries. We think it is an awesome program and since Sis. Hauata is in our branch we have been given the opportunity to be mentors for her. We are already working closely with her doing missionary work, so this is perfect for us and super easy as she is already doing so well. The program is especially meant to give them credit in BYU Pathways.
Speaking of BYU Pathways, our friend, Mark is doing terrific in his studies there. He is just finishing the preliminary courses and will soon begin his Business/Entrepeneur course. This is what he has been looking forward to ever since we first met him and told him about it. On our visit with him this week he was just glowing. He attends church regularly and is looking forward to getting a temple recommend soon. We invited him to help us on one of our zone luncheons as a service opportunity and he is excited to do that with us.
This week we have two zone luncheons to prepare and a temple session for the missionaries to officiate at. It will be a busy week for us, but so fun to be with the missionaries and to be inspired again by Pres. Sorensen. Last Friday we had our Corn Roast. It is tough to do something like that on a Friday night, so the turnout was not as good as we had hoped. We almost had more friends that the missionaries had invited than we had of branch members. But everyone who was there had a good time. I am working with the activities leaders to try and convince them to do things on a Saturday for future events. Traffic on Friday nights is a nightmare around here. We are trying to encourage the branch to do more gathering activities. The Linger Longers are very popular, but we hope to get them together on days other than Sundays too. This is the big challenge when the branch encompasses such a large area with huge traffic challenges, but the weekends are a lot better than the weekdays. We will continue to gather as best we can
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Au revoir,
The Glenns
(Gigi & Papi)