Hi everyone!
Guess what! I hit my year mark this past week! I'm halfway there! And I guess Bon Jovi would say "livin' on a prayer". Seriously though, were it not for prayer and divine intervention, I would not have made it this far. Being on a mission involves stress, exhaustion, talking to people I don't know, and about a hundred other things I don't particularly like. But I'm loving it. Some days and weeks are harder than others, but overall, being on a mission and serving the Lord full-time is just fantastic. That to me is a testimony of the power of prayer, and a testimony of the reality of God. He's helped me so much, and I'm so grateful for this time I have to be a full-time missionary. This last year has gone so fast! I can't believe it! I'm kinda scared at how fast it's been going.
We had some miracles this week! We had a baptism of an 11 year old named Bryan, which was pretty great. Also, we have been teaching a family who we thought were going to have to go through a lengthy interview process due to some unique circumstances. So we had President Cornelius (President Center's councilor) do the baptismal interview and afterward he called President Center and talked to him about it. I guess there were some things that came up about some circumstances with the family's background, but it was distant enough that President cleared them for baptism! So in addition to Bryan, this past Saturday we had three more, making for a total of 4! That's super exciting, and I'm so happy for that family. That's another family that I was actually the missionary who started teaching them. And I got to see all three of them get baptized! That's one of the perks of being in an area for almost 9 months. I love it when simple miracles like that happen. We were only planning on 1 baptism, but we got 4. And apparently there've been other miracles throughout the Cedar Zone as well. Lots of good things are happening over here, that's for sure!
We did exchanges with the Zone Leaders on Thursday night which lasted until Friday night. That was really fun. I was with Elder Duncan again, but this time I was in his area, SUU. I'd never done anything in a YSA (young single adult) area before. It's different. For one, the lessons seem to be about half as long, but twice as off topic as teaching in a regular, non-YSA area. Anyway, we had a good day. We woke up early that morning and played soccer (the only truly legitimate reason in my book for waking up earlier than we already have to) with some other Elders in Cedar City. We taught several lessons throughout the day. We had some really great pizza for lunch at a restaurant that I didn't know existed, that feeds missionaries for free, and that I swear is bigger on the inside. And we discovered a Maori translation of the Book of Mormon. That was hilarious. They have some of the most entertaining words in there, for instance, the Maori word for destruction: Whakangaromanga. Is that just awesome or what? And there were so many variations on that. I don't think half of them even had anything to do with destruction, but apparently they all share the same Maori root word or something. It was just really fun, because we already know and love the Book of Mormon, and to look at it and instead of it saying "destruction" and stuff like that, we're reading words like "Whakangaromanga" and "Whakamatautau". Anyway, call us weird, but we had a lot of fun looking at all the epic-ness of the Maori language. So yeah, we had a lot of fun, and got a lot of stuff done. It was a good exchange.
Well that's about it for now. I hope everyone has a great week!
-Elder Oswald
Picture 1- Bryan's baptism. From left to right: Sister Davila, me, Lance (Bryan's older brother who was able to baptize him), Bryan, Elder Bright, Elder Davila
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