i really appologize for not writing these past couple of weeks. it's been busy and we've been outta town and stuff. i told myself this morning that i would not sleep tonight until i've written you. so it is now about 12 am here, i'm dog tired, and these are the first spare moments i've had to write you!
so these past couple of weeks have been pretty hectic. i know i mentioned in my last email that we now have 9 zones in our mission now. We go on splits once with each zone every transfer, we spend some time in the office doing one or two things, or we have calls from missionaries and have errands we need to run, then the remainder of our time we get to spend in our area. that keeps us busy for a whole transfer.
well, for this transfer, president shulz will be coming, and so we decided to do all of the splits at the front end of the transfer. we don't know how much of our time we'll be spending with them when they get here, but if we knock out the splits before they get here, then after they get here either we'll either have the flexibility to spend a ton of time with them or else we have more time in our area.
so we kinda went a little crazy and did 9 zones of splits in 10 days from like the 8th to the 17th. actually, some of the time, we didnt even end up going on splits when we went to some of the zones. we ended up going with missionaries to visit their families that they were preparing to be sealed, and made sure all things were in order and everything was prepared. we were able to have meetings with bishoprics and people got temple recommend interviews and they became super excited about the goal and alot of good things happened. it was tiring but i was able to experience some pretty special things during those days, and my testimony was strengthened. i wont share them right now, but i'll just suffice it to say that i witnessed miracles and saw probably more clearly than i ever have God's influence in this work we are doing.
if there are two things i learned while persuing this goal they would be 1. the logistics and importance and blessings of families being sealed in the temple-especially husbands and wives (well done tyson & melissa!) and 2. that this is the Lords work, and he did things to push us towards accomplishing this goal when we pretty much had no way to finish it.
for example, the last family that got sealed last saturday is a couple that lives about an hour north of sunyani. they called president sabey out of the blue and said they wanted to seal their marriage, so he went and got them recommends and put a companionship of missionaries in charge of taking care of them and helping them to be prepared for the temple - only to find that the family wanted to be sealed in july-after our goal ends-because they will have family in town that
time. a couple of weeks later, president sabey had an impression to call them so he did. when he did, president just told them how excited and happy he was to see them preparing for the temple and the man basically said "actaully, we've been talking about it and we feel like we should do the sealing a little sooner than we planned." so they chose to do it on the 25th of june-the last possible day to be sealed before the goal ends, even though they weren't aware of our goal. meanwhile, all of that companionships other candidates ended up not working out...meaning that if that family didnt just up and out of nowhere, FEEL like they should seal their marriage a week earlier than they planned to, we would have failed the goal. but...the Lord set this goal for us and He accomplished it for us too.
so i guess i forgot to say that we accomplished the goal. i was doing some thinking about it this week and it is very easy to see how special the ghanaian people are. think about it. think about the goals we have set over the past couple of years in this mission (for every missionary in the mission to...baptise a future leader ,baptize a husband and wife, baptize a referral from a recent convert, activate a less active and baptise a referral from that less active, help a recent convert to go to the temple for baptisms, and the latest...help a family to be sealed in the temple). think about how many countries in the world the church is in. alot. now think about how many of them do you think these kinds of goals could be set let alone accomplished, every one of them. i just kind of have to remind myself to every once and a while take a step back and see how special these people are and how much the love God. so, in the past four months, every missionary in our mission both baptized a family and helped a family to seal in the temple.
so since those splits, we had the week of the 20th. we had zone conference in kumasi on that monday then spent the rest of the week doing stuff in the office that we'd neglected a bit because of our road trip (and also teaching in our area). then we experienced the nerv-racking feeling from the final weekend of the goal. 5 families sealed on the 24th and 25th and the goal was finished.
then this past week we kinda did the same thing again. we were in cape coast running errands and doing office stuff and teaching in our area. we have a guy named adzeah-mensah who is really excited about the church and just loves it. he comes to church every week and says it's taking too long for us to baptize him. we gave two blessings to sick people this week. one was a young girl in our branch (josphing abraham) who had a talk to give on sunday. she had been pretty sick for a few days when we gave her the blessing on friday and on sunday she was able to come and give her talk. the other was a member who is from accra but is staying with her mother who is in our branch right now. he'd been really really sick for about two weeks and hadn't been able to go back to accra to take care of his family. when we saw him he could barely walk because he was so weak. all the doctors he went to see gave him different kinds of medicine but none of them worked, rather it was getting worse with time. we gave him the blessing one morning, and the next morning we recieved a very gracious phone call from the man telling us that he is 100% healthy and was about to leave to go back to his family in accra.
so today was a really sweet day. we had zone conference at 9 oclock this morning for the 6 southern zones in the mission. it was rather short. elder adams and i gave a quick instruction about how we can continue to do (in our companionships and in our areas) the things we have done for these goals even though they are no longer misson goals.
sister sabey followed with a talk about how much she loves us, on how she knows the shulz are called by inspiration to adopt her children (us), and some parting advice that really i think will stick with me. "Do not live below you're potential."
president sabey then gave his final instruction of his mission. prior to the meeting, he told elder adams and i that he always thought that the last zone conference he would have such a difficult time deciding what to instruct on because he would have so much that he wanted to teach them before he left. as the time approached though, he couldn't really think of anything to teach them, and concluded that the reason for that is because, later this week this will no longer be his mission. so most of his instruction was talking about what we've learned from the goal, talking about how perfect the shulz's are for our mission right now, and stuff like that. we ate lunch then went to the stadium that the professional football team in cape coast (the cape coast mysterious dwarfs. no, i didnt misspell that. powerful huh?) and played a football tournament. cape coast zone lost to swedru/abura in the finals...
after, we came back to the apt and showered then we went over to elder and sister saunders house. they invited the sabeys and us over for dinner and afterwards we watched a dvd that the mission made for them saying goodbye to the sabeys. today i got a lot of good memories.
so, by next week, i'll have a new mission president. man that's so weird. i'm really sad to see the sabeys go but excited to see where president shulz takes this mission. sorry again for not emailing the past couple of weeks i've tried to make this one a long one to make up for it-hope it wasn't too boring.
love you and love ghana,
elder mackay
ps heres a picture of me with the sabeys taken tonight after dinner.
