IT RAINED THIS WEEK
For
a while here in Fogo, it's been getting cooler and the clouds have been
swooping in, but this week, the rain began to fall. Now, I guess I
never really took much thought about the rain back home, most of the
time it just interruted or cancelled a soccer game, but here, rain is
quite literally everyones life. In Cova Figueira, everybody has
what's called a petxiga (best guess at how to spell it, pronounced
pe-jee-ga), which is the Fogo-Creole word, more or less, for field. The
livelyhood of everyone in the town relies on whether the rain comes, and
if they're able to harvest their crops or not. If no rain comes, these
people have got nothing, so you can imagine the excitement when we got
rain about 3 times this past week. To give some insight into how dry it
really is, as we went out to teach one day while it was sprinkling, in
my mind I was complaining about why we had to work in the rain, if I was
just gunna get wet and miserable. About 8 seconds into that thought, I
realized I was being a baby, and to tough it out, as difficult as it
was. I could say it was the #struggle, but to be honest, it really
wasn't :P
In thinking about the rain, I had a
study this week, where I got in real deep, and thought about the ways in
which we need spiritual rain in our own lives. I'm sure I sound awful
prententious saying all this, but I thought about how each one of us is
this seed, trying to grow to become what our Heavenly Father wants of
us, and we can do all we can to grow, but unless we're getting that
spiritual rain from our Father, we've got nothin'. With that being said,
it's amazing to see how Heavenly Father can give that spiritual rain to
us as we diligently search for it. We've been teaching this kid,
Ricardo (I say kid, but he's like 18), who's got an icredible desire to
grow spiritually, but was doing little to actually get it. This week, we
worked with him to get reading in the Book of Mormon, and one day, he
stopped us on the street and was like, 'guys! I read from page 1 to page
19 in like, one day, and I totally get what's going on!', and on top of
that, we had what was one of the coolest lessons on my mission talking
about answers from the Holy Ghost, and he was able to really feel in
that moment that he got an answer. The only problem, is we've gotta help
him make that next step to be baptized, something that's a bit of a
bump or a hill for him to get over, despite the fact that he wants to
follow Heavenly Father with everything he's got. We're working for
baptism this week, and it'll take something of a miracle for that to
happen, but I'm praying for that rain to come and help him grow!!
Because
of the rain coming this week, we had the opportunity to go up into the
petxigas with some of our favorite members (basically my family here),
and got to work with them. It was a super legit time. Basically, a bunch
of Cape Verdeans taught a wimpy white guy how to use a hoe, and I more
or less shoveled dirt over holes they'd put seeds in for like 4 hours.
My hands hurt so much after, I had that thing where you have your hands
wrapped around something so long that your fingers stick in that shape,
and it's like near impossible to straighten them again. That day was a
dang tiring day.
In all honesty, this week has
been dang exhausting. We've been walking all over the place, working a
heck ton (both for the Lord and in the petxigas) and all I wanna do is
lay down and die at the end of pretty well every day. One of my few joys
in life has become my case of Mountain Dew and the Froot Loops I bought
last week, and so my life basically consists of me going out during the
day, beggin people to talk to me, walking all over the place, then
coming home, laying on my bed exhausted, as I write in my journal and
eat such as was mentioned above. I'm so tired.
Funny
story for this week? Well, at one point, when we were in Tinteira, we
were talking with a member for a bit, and our Ward Mission Leader, Dani,
went off and kept on walking, and we lost him for a bit, so as we were
trying to find him, I saw him further down the road, appearing to be
talking to a teenage girl about something, but as we got closer, it
became apparent he was in a doctrinal argument with her. Turns out, the
girl was a member of the Adventist church (there's a billion of em
here), and Dani was trying to testify to her that he knew for a fact
that the Spirit World is where we go right after we die, and was getting
rather upset about it, while the girl was trying to ask him to prove it
in the Bible. Dani was taking it pretty seriously, but these Adventists
were being pretty chill, they thought it was funny how upset he was
getting, so I swooped in, all missionary-like, with the dialogue being
something along the follwoing lines:
Me: 'Hey, what's that
scripture you got in the Bible? Mind if I study it a bit tomorrow?' Her:
'Sure! Here it is!' 'Hey, if I study this scripture, would you mind
studying a little in the Book of Mormon?' 'No problem, we've got one at
home!' 'Awesome! Here's a chapter to read (Alma 40), and next week when
we come back, I'd like to talk a little about it' 'No worries, we'd love
to!' 'Sweet! Have a good one!' and I walked outta there like a
gang-buster. I'll be prideful and say I was darn proud of difusing the
situation.
Well, I'm sure that enough babbling for this week, hope you're all doing just peachy!
Elder Massey
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