Week #74 -“If You Want To Know the Lord, Go to Work For Him”

January 18, 2016

Hey Mom and Dad - I'm sorry to hear you are still dealing with your cold Mom. That just sucks you have been sick for so long! That's cool you got to speak in sacrament ;) I haven't had to do that in a few months. I still get a little nervous about speaking in Sacrament here, but mainly because I don't know which language to use haha. Please send me your talk, I'd like to read it! Knowing you I'm sure it was the best talk ever mom :) I love those fishing pictures Dad! I wish I could have been there to fish with you. 40 perch sounds like a lot! I remember us getting skunked at Starvation when we went there ice fishing before. So I'm glad you didn't get skunked! The collage you made looks awesome! I can't wait to see them all!

The Ati Atihan festival has been going on here in Aklan so the people have been kind of crazy with that. It's like Carnival or Mardi Gras, so lots of parades and cultural stuff. We didn't go into Kalibo this week because the traffic is so bad so we're just here in Tangalan emailing this week.

This week was different for me.  For some reason I had a lot of anxiety to get home haha Go figure? Every once-in-awhile homesickness will creep up on me and I get out of my groove for a bit, but thankfully it goes away again. I think what brought it on was there are a lot of my batch mates in Kalibo zone and we are all trying not to count the months left haha but we're all excited to get home! Nevertheless the work goes on as always and I'm still so glad to be here!!

We did a boatload of tracting this week which wasn't the funnest part of the week of course but we did talk to a lot of people which is a good thing! We've been asking the members for referrals because we've been struggling to find people who have the desire to progress. We've been teaching a part member family with 2 girls and a boy and the lessons go alright even though there are a million little kids running around and lots of noise haha. We walked up a road as far as we could because it looked really interesting and I was wondering who the heck would be living way out in the middle of nowhere and we found a guy with the last name Cheng and he has been listening to us the lest few days. There are lots of houses around the area but the people either hide from us or were too busy to listen. That's a common struggle here! We had a meeting with the Branch leaders yesterday so hopefully they will be able to get something going with the members. This guy named Roy, who is the coolest guy, offered to get the youth involved in the missionary work so he took some action on that but the other leaders weren't too ambitious about getting something done. We will have some young men and women work with us though this week so that will be cool! 

That's about it! Love and miss you lots!

Love Elder Rasmussen