Week 84 - January 25, 2016 - Hyderabad, India

This week flew by.  We got to visit a lot of our investigators this week which was really cool and we made it an emphasis to bring members to all of our lessons.  Some members even brought their friends to Church this week, so that was really cool.  So home teaching is probably going to take a few weeks before it gets going but our bishopric came up with an idea that each Priesthood Quorum will pick out a different family during the week to go visit.  It should be really effective if they all visit the homes.

We had a worldwide missionary broadcast on Friday morning and it was really awesome.  They said that there is like 75,000 missionaries and 418 missions around the world.  They talked about every aspect of missionary work basically,  Talking to people every where you go, seeking referrals from less-active and part member families, teaching investigators as instruments for the Holy Ghost, it was really awesome.

Then we had this sister return missionary who moved to Hyderabad this week and she called us asking for a blessing, so we went to her home and found out that her mom and sister aren't members of the church yet.  I guess they were going to be baptized in 2013 but at the last second they had some problems come up into their life so it didn't work out but things are better now.  Pretty crazy how sometimes Heavenly Father just prepares people and then when they are ready, he gives them into your hands.

Yesterday, we had 2 really awesome lessons in Elders Quorum and Gospel Essentials.  So at the beginning of the class, we split into 4 groups and the teacher gave each group a page of the newspaper then he gave everyone like 3 minutes to find either the words: peace, hope or joy and I think after time was over only one group found one of the words in the context of food.  So then he asked what do people look for in their lives.  Some of the answers included peace, joy and hope.  Then he asked based on the example we just did can the world give that to us and we said no.  Then he asked us to look up some of the verses in the scriptures to find these words and people noticed that there were so many to choose from.  Then he asked us based on this example can God give us these things and people answered yes.  I thought this was interesting because a lot of the time we turn on the news or read the paper just to see all the bad things that are going on rather than opening the scriptures or watching church videos to feel good.

Other than that, the election parties are gathering just about everywhere in preparation of the voting on February 2nd.  Mostly, all the people just gather in the streets and wave these different color scarfs around and shout things and at the end of the day the people give you some biryani and money.  I think which ever group has the most money will probably win.

Elder Wakefield