Wonderful Week in Fiji!

Week 63

14th March 2016

It has being another wonderful week here in Fiji, in the service of the Lord :) Recently I have being receiving a greater love for the work of the lord, I mean I always had a love but just these past 2 weeks it has increased even more so :)

We had another great 15 lesson week, out of the two investigators we had prepared for this month, only 1 is progressing currently, which is Judi our single mum investigator. Sadly again she didn't attend church this past Sunday though she really assured us she would & even bring her Aunt & cousin who seem very interested in the church. Even so, none were in attendance. We did have one investigator in sacrament though being Tevita. He being our baptismal date for next month, his wife too being a Returning member. Their a young couple though, Tevita being 20yrs and his wife Miriama 18yrs.. Its funny a lot of our investigators are young people haha between the ages of 18yrs -  24yrs :) It's pretty cool. 

Judi though, is doing terrific!! We just need to get her into the Chapel on Sundays lol. She was blown away when we shared about the Plan of Salvation and its meaning for us individually. She expressed that her next step is to start using the gift & power of repentance and the Atonement. Amazing!! we suspect though its the initial starting to go to church for her that might be scaring her a bit?? not sure but we're going to address it this Wednesday when we go see her :) Tevita, we had a solid lesson with him and his wife about how daily Prayer, scripture study and regular church attendance can help us in our lives. We checked up on him about how he was feeling about baptism, he shared that he feels he will be baptized he just wants to finish off all the lessons first.

One things i want to share with you though is about a experience we had with Judi. We arrived at Judi's home and didn't know she had some family over. We proceeded to share a lesson with them all together. We didn't know that Judi's aunty was a strong Assemblies of God member. We shared about the temple because they kept asking questions about it, we explained some of the works we do inside including the Baptisms for the Dead. We explained that we do this for those of our families that have never had the opportunity to accept the gospel. She shared saying that everyone makes there decision in life as to who they want to follow and if they chose to follow a "tree" she said then that's there choice and if they die they go to hell that's their choice. then she encouraged me and my companion to stop doing what we do BAHAHAHAHA it was kind of funny to be honest haha I thought about what she said though when we arrived home & i thought immediately about the Love of God and how it is eternal and available to everyone even to those who do not want it. Even if someone wasn't to chose God in this life and they went to spirit prison they still have the choice at some point when they are ready in spirit prison to accept the gospel into their lives. only thing is they have to wait for someone to do their work here on the earth..  Obviously she doesn't understand how the love of God works. 

Yesterday we had the chance to go to another Methodist Church, but this time we didn't speak we only attended to represent the church as it was a Multiple Church gathering to celerbrate the many followers of God in this one specific village. So my companion and I attended along with some other Priesthood holders from the village to represent the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints :) The service went for about 2 hours & wow!!  People jumping up, throwing hands in the air, shouting our thanks to God of what they called prayer, 3 preachers at the head shouting more than sharing the word of God. Money baskets going around for people to put money and believe what that the preachers told them which was "Those who give are blessed" obviously taking that bible reference straight out of context. I took notes down about the things they preached and testified of to the people. One of the less active members who I'm close with was the voice of reasoning for me when she came to speak to me and my companion after the service. She shared a lot of words of advice the main one being "take the positive and leave the negative" just what I needed to calm me down. I realized, there were some positives here, at least they were doing some form of praising God, the best way that they knew how I guess. Their scriptures were good though the explanation and teaching was far from the actual truth in the scripture but there were some positives. 

anyways thats all for today family, love you all!!!! take care please!! :)