It's great to hear from you all. I'm doing well!
For one reason or another, we didn't get much proselyting time in. After such a fantastic month, we're at a point where we're building our investigator list up again. Missionary work is a lot of up's and down's when it comes to teaching. Things build up, then they slow down. It's alright though.
Saturday and Sunday was our District Conference. We were blessed to have an Area Seventy - who is from Ghana - come and speak, as well as President and Sister Heid. The Saturday session was held at our meetinghouse, and the Sunday session was at a nearby hotel. It was anticipated that there would be around 250 people in attendance, and we got over 420! It was amazing because most of the District lives quite far away, and had to travel in buses all morning to make it. Most of our recent converts came, so that made me really happy. Several great talks were given, and it was just nice being around so many Mormons. It's common at home to congregate in large groups like that (Stake activities and such), but in areas like ours it's a much harder and uncommon event, so you can imagine how special it was for all these Mormons to be around Mormons!
Anyways, the highlight of my week came from yesterday actually. We went and visited Sarah's family (the one we just baptized last week). I decided to teach them about temples and families. During the lesson, the mother opened up about her firstborn son who died as a teen some years back. I've only heard her daughter mention him briefly previous to this. As we taught her about proxy baptisms and the blessing we have in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to baptize our relatives who have not had that chance, she wept and repeatedly said "I'll go and do it for him, I'll go and do it for him".
That was touching for us. I won't say I took baptisms for the dead for granted, but a profound gratitude came in me for the knowledge of the gospel that WE as member's of the Church have, and the blessing that we can unite families beyond the grave. Proxy baptisms mean so much more to me now that I understand how happy Sarah was to hear that message for the first time. The gospel really is the good news, isn't it!
Well, Elder Omokoh has one week left. I'll do all I can to help him finish strong!
I did get Ninnie's and your packages! Can you believe your package only took 11 days to get here? Amazing! The packages are way nice. I almost forgot to mention it. Yeah, there's a ton of good stuff in them. Way nice.
Hope Rosie and Joe have a great first week of school. One, two, three, SCHOOL!
Love always,
Elder Nissinen
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