Oct 28, 2013

Well another week has come and gone in the wonderful land of Oda. Life is good.  I just got this week’s weather forecast from Hannah, looks like we're looking and mid 80's this week. Not too bad!

First highlight from this week was the package that Hannah sent me, on May 2.  I was very happy to have some peanut butter and coffee mate.  Sweet package, thanks a ton, I love getting mail!

Another great moment was when we went back to see the Queen Mother Honorable Betty.  She was busy and couldn't see us but she gave us a parting gift of juice boxes and bars of soap.  The soap is pretty nice; it’s a good brand for washing clothes.  It was pretty fun.  Another man gave us a giant bag of oranges.  I had to take my scriptures out of my bag to fit all the oranges in there. I ended up just putting my scriptures on my belt.  Looked pretty goofy contacting people that way but I figure I'm white and already look ridiculous so no fear haha.  I got some pictures of me with the scriptures on the belt; I'll try to send them sometime.

We also had a great contact with a drunk man. He passed by us and we greeted him.  I ask him how he was and he said "I'm very, very, very, very fine."  So we got had a conversation with him for a while.  We gave him our number so maybe sometime he'll get curious and give us a call.

I attended my first Ghanaian funeral this week. To my knowledge, that is the first funeral I've been to, or at least remember.  An older man in the congregation died. Everything was in Twi so I didn't understand what was happening but it was cool. There was a little meeting where some members spoke and them we took the casket to the cemetery, right next to the chapel and buried him. The graves are shallow cement holes that are cemented over. We were there and then 3 other funerals came with their trumpets, drums, and loud speakers. Then the next Sunday they always have the Thanksgiving service.  Again, no idea what happened but we had about 40 people in investigators class. They basically just did a Q and A session that was mostly about the Book of Mormon.  It was really,  really cool to see members who attended just stand up and then bare their simple yet powerful testimonies of the Book of Mormon.

The best part of this week was a new man we contacted.  I was prompted to contact this man who turned out to be a pastor of another church but then through that the Spirit got us in the right place at the right time to meet another man. We contacted him and he invited us to his house. We came (he's the guy who gave us a ton of oranges) and just introduced ourselves and the church. He promised he would come on Sunday.   We got to church 30 or 40 minutes early and he was there, he'd been there for more than an hour.  I made sure he knew that it started at 11 which he did but he said he was new so he figured he should be early.  He loved the service and after we taught him with a member in which he told us about a dream he had.  He had a dream where one man kept coming and pushing him over (He's going through some rough stuff in his life) and then 2 other guys came and stopped him. They helped him get back up. The next day he met us. He said he knows that we are those 2 men and that he is prepared to join the church and ask what he has to do in order to become a member. Super sweet experience!  I loved it!  It’s things like that that gives you the motivation to keep getting back up and pushing on everyday no matter how tired you are.

One thing I would share this week though is about recognizing the spirit in our lives.  Preach My Gospel dedicates a whole chapter to.  It was something I really tried to focus on this week. One thing I found that helps is take some time to write down your spiritual experiences.  As you do that I promise you will begin to see all the little ways the Spirit influences you in your life and you will recognize those promptings more and have the strength to follow them more.

Have a fantastic week!

Love,

Elder Clark

PS: Another thing I've learned is that smiling changes lives.  Just smile, it makes all the difference. :D

Oct 21, 2013

Welp, there goes another week! It’s crazy how you can just put your head down to the work and then its Sunday again.  Crazy how time goes by so fast! Well, we had another exciting week in Ghana.

Best contact of the week was an old woman. She was stilling there pounding palm nuts (they use a mortar and pistol to pound these nuts to get the oil from them) we walked up and started talking to her. She is 80 years old and told us she wasn't interested in the church because she's "waiting for God to take her." Yikes, waiting for God to take you?  

Another interesting memory, a few weeks ago we had our primary program. It was very sweet. My favorite part was when one boy gave his little talk  and ended it with "Long live the church, Long live Primary!" while shouting into a microphone.  It was great.

This week we were teaching a great guy. The missionaries were teaching him before we came so we just continued. He knows the church is true and read the Book of Mormon and everything. He's even introducing us to his friends to teach them. The only problem is he won't come to church. I don't know why. Anyway we were teaching him this week and I've been having some allergies, I wish I brought some medicine for that, I found some this week. I took 2 in the morning and I guess I had a little reaction or something because when we were teaching him I started rocking back and forth and my eyes were dilated and I couldn't read my scriptures and I couldn't really see. My eyes started drooping and my companion said I really started slurring my words and everything. He said he thought I was having a stroke. Weirdest feeling ever!  I just start praying to let it stop because I do most of the talking in our companionship and just like that, instantly it went away.  I was so grateful.

And that's about it for this week.  I love you all.

Have a fantastic week!

Love,
Elder Clark

Hello everyone,                                                                                            Oct 14, 2013

How was your week? We had another fun week in Ghana.

We had some great lessons this week.  We met a new person and started teaching him. He doesn't speak English but he can understand it for the most part and I don't speak Twi and I really can't understand it for the most part so it was a fun lesson. We were laughing a lot and had a good time so he asked us to come back. We went back Saturday night and as soon as we sat down I noticed a lot of wine and saw a Word of Wisdom problem and the first thing he did was walk over to a bottle and bring it to me and ask me if it was ok to drink wine. We said no and he had a little bit of a hard time with that but he accepted the no alcohol thing and promise to come to church. Sunday he actually did come too, I was really surprised but it turned out so GOOD. He has a lot of friends who a members and he loved the church.  In Investigators class he was asking questions and making comments left and right.  He loved the church and after church he told me that he was going to keep coming back every week.  Sweet!

Another boy came to church yesterday too. We started teaching him and his 2 friends a few weeks ago but pretty much stopped teaching, yesterday he showed up at church.  He said the other 2 sent him to take pictures of the church and bring it back to show them before they would come. He wanted to leave when one of the members walked up to him and is one of his teachers at school. He took him and made sure he was understood everything and introducing him to the deacons and teachers.  

Those were pretty much the high lights of my week. We found a 2 less actives just through our finding this week which was really cool. One of them is an old man who stopped coming to church 6 or 7 years ago because his family doesn't really like the church.  I guess we just have to find a way to get him back to church.  He said he was going to at one point but he never got around to it.

I experienced the "rain wall" this week. Twice actually. It was nuts. So basically the rain wall is like a wall, of rain.  You can literally hear it coming.  We were walking on a path doing some contacting and I heard it coming.  It sounds like a big wind storm but there was only a light breeze.  I turned around and it was just a wall of gray.  I moved really fast just as it started pouring buckets or rain on us. We ran under the roof of the closest house to wait it out. The second one was yesterday. It was even worse. It moved a lot slower so I got to watch it moved across the yard of a house we were at. The far side it was raining super hard but we were still in the sunlight.  It was nuts!
That's about it for us this week.  I hope you all have a great week!

Love,        

Elder Clark

Hello everyone,                                                                                   Oct. 7, 2013

This week was fantastic in Ghana. We were really blessed as far as the teaching goes. We had some really good lessons this week and were really able to help some people progress. First off though, this week we had some major highlights.  First, I found strawberry jam and peanut butter. It’s the same stuff that Mom always gets from Winco, I'm super excited to try some. Second is last night I took the time to boil some water to add it to the water for my bucket shower. BEST THING EVER. That was the first time I've had a hot shower since I came here and it was fantastic.  I could keep on going on about how amazing it was but I'll stop at that.

We taught some really great lessons this week. One was to a woman that we had been teaching for a while and she wouldn't accept some of what we were teaching her so we had kind of stopped seeing her. We were standing on the road thinking of what to do because an appointment just fell through and she walked up and asked if we could come to teach her again. We taught her the Plan of Salvation and she was really interested in the Spirit world and that missionary work goes on there. We read some parts from the Bible (1 Peter) and she loved it. She said she was going to go and ask her pastor about it to see what he had to say. I told her that he might not agree with what we taught her but she said that because she saw it in the bible she knew it was true.   It could be the turning poin. We have our fingers crossed. We taught another guy the same thing and he really liked it too. People in Ghana really like the Plan of Salvation.  Maybe that's just the world.

Oh yeah, we had the best rejection so far yesterday. I've had some pretty good one but yesterday was the one I've been waiting for for the longest time.  We went to meet a man at his house. We contacted him and then he saw us on the street and he asked us to come yesterday. So we went to the house and knocked but nobody answered. So I called the man and heard his phone ringing inside the house.  I figured he probably just left his phone at home and then I heard him answer. Then he explained that he was sorry but he left to go to a funeral.  I heard him talking on the phone and through window.   After I hung up I went to the window and told him to have a great day.

This week I read the Living Christ, I would invite everyone to read that again this week. It is amazing.  I love it!  I also read the chapter from Jesus the Christ about the atonement.  It’s amazing how much Christ went through for all of us. The Atonement is something I really want to learn more about and be able to apply more in my life but I know with all my heart the Jesus Christ IS the son of God. He suffered and died for my sins and the sins of every single person that has ever lived. He is our Savior and Redeemer, our older brother and the perfect example for all of us.

Have a T-rrific day!

Love,

Elder Clark

Wow, October already??

Well, I think we are on top of the world this week. We had a really fun week. When President Hill came into our mission he started having each branch/ward have an Open House in their building. We finally had ours this week on Saturday. We were also able to go the Kade Branch's on Wednesday last week too. They were a ton of fun.  President Hill and the AP's always go to all the open houses and 4 of us from Oda went to Kade and 4 from Asamankese went there too and the office elders so we had a LOT of missionaries there.  The main idea was to have the members stand at different stations in the church and explain things and then just have groups of people rotate around the building.  While the members were inside all the missionaries were outside contacting people and inviting them to the open house and then actually walking them to the building. The mission has an 18 seat van that we were using to transport people. I was in the car with the office elder.  We would just drive up to a group of people that the missionaries were trying to get to come and I would slide open the door jump out and then every person I shook hands with I would just take them into the van with me.  You get 18 plus missionaries doing contacting in one small area and it goes like fire!  Everyone we talked to said they loved the Church so it was good.  We had more than 150 people go through the church in about 2 hours.  It’s a ton because the branch there only has about 40 people.

That was pretty much the highlight of the week. We spent a lot of time preparing for the Open Houses and we weren't able to do a lot of teaching but it was worth it. Maybe you guys could do an open house every once in a while?  It's great to help people with their curiosity. There are a lot of rumors about the Church over here like we have a pool (baptismal font), or we have a secret room that we cut up dead people or we drink blood or... There are a lot of misconceptions so the Open House helped to fix that.

Oh another adventure was we were in a car waiting for it to fill to go to a village called Essam and I was signing to my companion, he taught me the ASL alphabet and I like to practice.  I also had a member teach me the Twi alphabet and I got my hands on a Twi Book of Mormon so I'm trying to learn how to read it so maybe I can speak Twi a little bit better.  My inspiration was from the movie, The Other Side of Heaven.  It's a lot harder than I thought it would be.

That's about it from my end of the world.  Just to let you know that I really do know that this Church is true and everything we stand for is truly from God.  I love this gospel and everything it teaches us.  I Love seeing the difference it makes in people lives as we teach it to them and as they accept it and live the principles of the gospel. True happiness can only be found though the Church and everlasting happiness can only be found in following and abiding by its teachings. I love the Book of Mormon and things it teaches us. I love being a missionary.

Love,

Elder Clark

Hello,                                                                                    Sept. 23, 2013 (Mom forgot to post last week)

Well another week has come and gone.   

Probably the most exciting thing that happened this week was yesterday. We went out proselyting and got caught out in a rain storm. We just left the house of somebody we contacted and it started raining like crazy. One thing about the rain in Ghana is that it is like a sprinter. It doesn't wind up, starting as a drizzle then getting harder. It goes straight to 100% instantly. So we ran with our bikes to a little shelter. Basically it was 4 wooden polls with a tin roof on them. It was an adventure.  After a few minutes we were standing in a small river that covered our shoes. We were right next to a soccer field and as soon as it started raining a bunch of little kids came running out to play soccer in the rain. They were splashing and sliding all over the place and ended up pretty playing in the water and mud.  I was super jealous but I was in my church clothes so joining them wasn't really an option.  I really wanted to though. I took lots of pictures; hopefully I'll be able to send some home sometime.

We contacted some really cool guys this week that hopefully we can start teaching. One contact was really funny. We knocked on the door to a house and a guy came out and we were talking to him and we invited him to church and he told us he was blind and couldn't make it. Then we gave him a Restoration pamphlet for his family and he read the title.... that was pretty interesting.  We've been really trying to go back and see people that we have already contacted in the past which is good. We had a pretty good week.

We contacted one husband and wife. Great people!  They had this really cool quote on their wall. That says "God grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." I loved it, adds a lot of perspective to life.

Other events in my life, I'm learning sign language from m companion. I've got the alphabet down and during church we'll sign to each other because we can't understand the Twi. He is also teaching me a little bit about how to draw. I finally found a way to get the Book of Mormon in Twi so I've having one brought to me by the Office Elders.  I'm pretty excited about that.  Maybe I'll have an Other Side of Heaven moment and read it all night then be able to speak Twi.  

Anyway, things are going well and we are working hard.

Love,
Elder Clark