December 15, 2008

Hey everybody!

This week has been pretty good. Busy stuff with going to Cape Town for Zone Conference on Thursday and staying over til friday evening. It went way good tho. We were seriously at zone conference at the Guguletu Chapel for like 10 hours straight. It was brutal but still fun. The second half we just sang Christmas songs and watched a slideshow and watched an animated cartoon after the book "You are Special". Remember that book? hey that's a good book eh? i sure like it. Good message ya know...

Well as for the Missionary work here in Paarl, it's been way good this week. We did a lot for Pauleen Davids this week. Met with her Tuesday and Thursday. After our lesson on Tuesday we planned on doing some service for her by replacing her door. Well the hinges...her door would run along the ground and it was tough to close, so we volunteered to fix it for it. Well we got some tools...hammer and screws and some other random stuff that we could gather from members..and got the door off. We cut up the door and made new spots for the hinges to go by carving it with a hammer and a screwdriver...yeah it was tough. Well long story short, it worked. haha. and now her door works just great. It was only like 2.5 hours or so...a bit more than we planned on.
But continuing with Sister Davids...We've taught her about the 10 commandments and word of wisdom lately. And when we saw her on thursday, she gave us all the coffee in her home so she wouldnt have it anymore. She's a very committed lady, as you can see. She's at church every sunday and we'll probably ask her to be baptized pretty soon. She's awesome tho. She calls me Ravaldo or something like that. until she looks at my name tag and reads Devalngo...haha. it's not that she cant speak english, she's just funny. She gets it right occasionally.

O yeah when we went into Cape Town it was so nice. So much cooler than here in Paarl. I dunno how many of you realize that when i say it's like 40 C it's like 110 F. yeah last fast sunday it was 43 C. HOTT! i about died. but this week hasnt been that bad. yesterday was cooler and cloudy. i enjoyed it.

We met with this less-active guy who's 21 named Jonathan. His familly has been members for a while, but he got way mixed up in drugs and all sorts of stuff. He's got a couple kids, and him and his girlfriend are having some hard times. Well we've invited him up to do FHE with us these past couple weeks, and we finally got to meet with him and his girlfriend one on one this past week. They've been struggling in their relationship and his girlfriend Shareen got really emotional when she was talking to us. We planned on just seeing how things were and maybe just sharing a thought or something, but instead we jumped right into the plan of salvation and taught them part of it. Shareen has such a strong desire to learn more and is loving our company there. They said they'd be at FHE tonight so that's good. We're hoping Jon will come back to church, and he'll get his life back on track. I'll keep ya posted...

We saw Raymond, (Zimbabwae guy) we hadn't seen him for a few weeks. We left him the BOM when we first met him, and come to find out he's been reading it like crazy. We left him with questions of the soul, (questions that people commonly have, like is there a god? Why does got let bad things happen? Does He answer prayers?, things like that) With references to find answers in the BOM. Well he had even been writing questions and highlighting stuff in his scriptures. He had a few questions about the resurrection and wanted to know more, and what he ended up doing was even teaching me some stuff i didn't know. He also had questions about one that said, how can i avoid sin? He's been showing the book to many people and having them read from it as well, even when he's at work. He knows not to just read the scriptures, but to look deep into them, and seek for the better understanding. It's crazy. He taught us some stuff for sure. Way cool guy.

We had our sports again at the church on saturday. Played some volleyball and dodgeball. We had a way good turn out. well like 10 people...but that's way good for us. haha. Kenny, (kid who had a drug problem) has been coming out and he's even coming back to church. He's stayed for all of church the past 2 sundays. It's awesome to see how much progress he's been making. Sorry if you dont remember him, i probably mentioned him like a month ago.

We watched the Christmas Devotional yesterday at the church. Hey that was good huh!? I enjoyed it. I didnt get to see the Temple Square lights tho...so i was kinda bummed about that. i'm sure it's beautiful tho.

Hmmm well mommy this is my shout out to you...have a wonderful Birthday on the 18th! dont party too hard like they do down here! ha!

Hope everyone else is doing good! Christmas is soo soon!

-Elder Devenney