Well, these were just an exclamation
point two weeks! I apologize for not writing last week, but we had a situation
come up with the cars, and we lost a couple hours of our preparation day... ah,
well... Life goes on!
To start off, we had a baptism a
couple weeks ago! Everyone is stoked about that, because we're the first
assistants to do that since President came to the mission. The best part is
that probably won't be the last time either! We're really excited. Kwabena was
a young man from Ghana who wanted to learn more about the church, so requested
a visit on Mormon.org and has just been a blessing to teach! His faith is so
great and it's been an incredible journey for him.
We got to work with some translation
equipment, too, because President invited a whole bunch of French-speaking
people to his sons mission farewell, which was the 19th! It was awesome!
We were very busy with the work too,
and had just a fantastic week with many spiritual lessons!
We had a couple of exchanges, too,
one of which I was back in Manassas with Elder Gustafson!! Sound familiar? haha
it was a total blast being back in the same place with the same guy, and we
taught some of the same people too!! It was just awesome.
The night we had Kwabena's baptism,
we were actually on an exchange, but we both made it. The next day, we got a
third companion for a couple of days. It was an emotional couple of days,
because this Elder was going home temporarily for some health reasons and we
were waiting for his flight to go through. Because of a couple snow days, it
was postponed from Tuesday to Thursday, which just prolonged the roller
coaster.
This past week has just been a
logistical ride, too. Last Saturday, we got a phone call from Elder S. Gifford
"exclamation point" Nielsen, who said he would be in town and wanted
to have a whole mission conference with us! So, we started getting ready for a
conference! Some newly purchased equipment, a couple emergency transfers for
exterior reasons, some trips to the airport, and a whole lot of paper and car
work later; we finally had the mission conference! It was all just a huge blur,
but we had a blast and are slowly catching up on lost sleep.
It was very validating for us to
have that third elder with us, too. He was just blown away with the schedule we
keep: "You guys do just as much missionary work as everyone else, and then
a ton more! I'm not even the one doing the office work and I'm exhausted! I
don't know why anyone would ever aspire to this!" haha
Elder Nielsen's conference was
incredible. He spoke a lot about our role as helping others to make and keep
covenants and what each of those covenants does for each of us and the
spiritual power the Lord gives us as we keep them.
Elder Riggs and I have been studying
compassion a lot, and it's been fantastic. One of the temple presidency here in D.C. shared with us a talk about how
the culture of the Celestial kingdom is compassion, and we've been learning so
much about it. This morning, we read through Moses chapter 7 and just had an
incredible revelatory experience watching the Lord as He teaches Enoch
compassion.
Today, we're off to have lunch with
a set of zone leaders, and as transfers approach, life is about to start
blurring. We've been working a lot on planning so we can remain busy with missionary
work during all the office work we're going to have to do. We're excited
though. Elder Riggs and I are just loving life and work together. It's great :)
Love you all!
-Elder Hodgson
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