Monday, December 22, 2014

Week 23 - Antsirabe - Christmas is Coming!

So... This week has been pretty exciting. We got to enjoy the hectic transfers but we managed to make it through all right. Everybody is starting to settle down, and it's been nice to meet some new missionaries.

I'll start of at the end of the week and work backwards. On Saturday we had the Talent show. It was pretty great, there were lots of surprising talents and there were lots of not so surprising talents. Elder Razakamandimy and I were one of the last talents to go. Razaka was playing the guitar and singing a song he wrote while I played the drums on the keyboard. We looked like straight up G's in our snapbacks and RayBans. And proselyting clothes... We were looking pretty hood, and everybody loved us, especially when the bass dropped and I came in. But then there was Tahiry interrupting our stream of thugness. He decided to switch out his outfit right before we went on and wore a... jesters hat...? Then he was much to flamboyant as he sang the harmonies. Razaka had his nice manly guitar playing thing going on, and I had a nice Daft Punk head nod going on with the keyboard, so it just seemed a little out of place. But that's ok, we got called back for an encore! We were the only ones who got that, so in my mind, we won this unjudged talent show pretty squarely. What can I say, we're keeping it real out here.


Then, a neat thing that happened this week. I have been studying faith this last little while, and there is a nice entry in the Bible Dictionary about that. One of the things it says is that miracles always follow faith, and the elements can be controlled by faith. Anyway, skip to Thursday and it was raining very hard. That's not really new because it is the rainy season, after all. Anyway, we could barely hear anything because most of the roofs are made out of corrugated tin, so I decided to offer a small prayer while all of the cannons were going off above my head. I asked for the rain to stop, but once I was finished I felt a little ashamed of my prayer. It just felt like I had been to wishy washy and the prayer had kind of been a "do it if it by Thy will and in Thy time" kind of thing, and I felt like that was more just throwing a wish out there than actually exercising faith. So I prayed again and asked that the rain stop in the next five minutes and it stopped in two. He's real. Usually the rain doesn't stop that easy during a big rainy season storm like that, often the rain can last for several days. So that was pretty cool and it helped me change my perspective of what it actually means to exercise faith. You got to be an agent and actively seek something, like the Brother of Jared. Don't just throw a wish out there and hope for the best. That's not actually doing anything. But I know that faith works. Then, after that, the next day we had three appointments in a row that weren't there. So we turned to go grab a quick snack two of the times and then they walked right up just as we were turning away! Then for the last one we felt like heading over to someone else's house and we found them. We had really great lessons with each one and it was great to see the Lord's hand guiding the work.

Malagasy Morsel for the week: bandy. BAHN-dee. It means like a young adult man who is just a thug. Imagine a bunch of kids trying to look like rappers sitting on the side of the road calling out crap to the missionaries as they walk by. That's a bandy. Example: Elder Razakamandimby and I looked totally bandy in the talent show. Do something with that word.

Anyway, HAVE THE MERRIEST CHRISTMAS EVERR!!! And a happy new year too.

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