The roller coaster ride that the mish is

welcome home tyler! i cant decide if he's the lucky one or if i am...

well. i dont have a ton to report on. i suppose i'll just try to give you an idea of the roller coaster ride that the mish is.

koffi and his family promised to come to church but didnt show up. (that's pretty much everyone in ghana, though. we usually have like 5-10 people a week tell us that they'll come to church and more than half usually don't show up. that still makes for a ton of investigators at church though! its gay though - we straight up tell them not to promise us that they will come unless they will actually do it. we tell them that it will make us happy if they just tell us that they wont come rather than get our hopes up and let us down. but they still go on and lie haha).

now let me tell you about joel and englebert... we didnt get to meet with them until saturday this week, and we went and had a decent lesson. at the end, they mentioned that their mother had been asking them if we were expecting the two of them to leave the methodist church (where their whole family goes) and come to church with us. i kinda expected that to happen, so, from the beginning we've been trying to meet with their mother but all she says every single time is "oh i'm busy today, next time, next time." so at the end of the lesson on saturday they were asking us what they should do and we wouldnt tell them. we only told them to find out what God wants them to do and do that - then bore testimony. they said they'd think about it and they said they still wanted us to pick them up on sunday morning for church.

so sunday morning comes, and englebert opens the door and he's not in his church clothes. we get in and i ask their mom how she is doing and she says "i'm not fine." i was hoping that her reason would be that she was just not feeling well or something. but i asked her why and she just said "because of the things that you told my sons yesterday." i felt terrible. englebert brought us some chairs and we sat down and tried to smooth things over. she GAVE it to us. she just went on about how she is the one taking care of them, and they should move in with us and we should take care of them, and we barely know her sons and how can we try to take over their lives and all this stuff. the root of the problem was that she only heard excerpts of our conversation as she was sitting in the other room. she thought that she heard us ask their kids which church was the true one and tell them that they shouldnt listen to her, only to God.

bishop had been walking by earlier and she GAVE IT to him about us too haha. (when we got to the church bishop otoo said he basically told her "from the things i hear, i agree with what they've done but i'll talk to them." we explained all that had happened and he understood perfectly and gave us a few similar examples from his mission haha.)

i won't explain everything in detail, but she said some very hurtful things. we calmed her down, assured her that the LAST thing that we want to do is cause a division in their family, that we wouldnt ever come back if she didnt want us to, and stuff. we told her that we never told them not to listen to her. we explained, using the bible, that it is against God's very nature to have more than one church, so we only wanted them to ask God which church it was. it was cool by the end, but there was still alot of tension i think.

walking away from the house i just felt like crying. i've had some pretty big disappointments on my mission, but i just felt terrible after this one. some of the things she said hit me pretty deep. it is crazy to think how people can be just completely confused about everything that we stand for and are working towards. it's crazy to think that we are most likely the only two people in the whole village of 20,000 people that all they do is just go out and try to help people to go to heaven all day every day. all we do is look for opportunities to serve people around us and make their lives easier. yet, somehow, they very often have the exact opposite of an opinion of us.

i've learned some awesome things this weekend from the Lord and this is one experience that i will look back on alot. our plan is to 1 - keep visiting the boys maybe once or twice a week, but not focus as much about church. just make sure that they understand that anyone from the family is always welcome. and 2 - just find ways to serve that woman in order to get her to understand what and Who we are actually working for. we're gunna look for chances to pound fufu, wash clothes, clean up the house, or do any freaking thing that we can to help her. we'll see how it goes. i still feel that those two boys are gunna end up on missions.

anyways i hope this email wasnt too much of a downer. i don't want you to think that i'm like depressed or anything - cause i'm not. i'm actually far from it. there was actually a ton of sweet stuff that happened this week but i just wanted to give you an idea of how much of a roller coaster ride the mission really is. all is well, i'm living it up, i love you.

well i gotta go-there's a football game on and i'm on the closest computer to the tv (of course) and i got a covenant to keep!

love,
elder mackay