Elder Jake Roush's Madagascar Adventures: December 23, 2013

December 23, 2013

Well my dearest family, friends and other people that are reading this email and being amazed by the sheer mahafinaritraness of whatever the heck i'm talking about right now,

In the words of my dearest Elder Quigley... Not a whole lot happened this week!! But seriously we just can't even focus because of the impending joyous explosion of crazy happiness that will unfold wednesday night at 6:00 pm Madagascar time!! Haha but yeah. So. This week we had a pretty sick program planned... finally and we thought we had cracked the Da Vinci code of how to make the program work! We had many times scheduled, member help ready, and blah blah blah blah blah. AND! poop week. HAHA! Yes! Missionary work! haha but yeah it was pretty frustrating. For many various reasons, like not having a guy with us or having absolutely no idea where the people live or insane women in our ward that are trying to be us.... the program didn't work out. But hopefully next week will be better because there is definitely potential! And Quigley and I are ready to go! By the way freaking Quigley.... Love the dude! We get along super well and are having a lot of fun... Mostly from talking in weird voices to malagasies and having a billion and a half inside jokes! it kinda sucks he's going home in 4 weeks... but no worries! Lord's will and stuff... haha. Anyways I dont have much to say so i'll tell you about an investigator we inherited from the sisters. His name is Andry and he's a stud! he's 18 and we just started with him! He's soo sick! We've taught him the restoration and the book of mormon! After we read the intro with him we asked him what he thought he should do... he said "well i guess i need to read the book of mormon, ponder it, then pray to god to know if it's true..." BOOM!!! Let's just say, that's the first time an investigator got that right!! He's sooo sick! He's stoked to keep learning and has a bap date for january 25.. Speaking of baptisms... We had one this week! On saturday i got to baptize stephanie! It was pretty cool, she was really excited and bore an impressive testimony for an 11 year old after. She's such a shy little girl it's so funny, the picture kind of shows that! It was funny... the door to the baptismal font was locked and the bishop couldn't open it... then a counselor comes in, fiddles with it, then says "by the power of the priesthood!" and opened it hahahahha i laughed so hard.. .then save stephanies soul! what? haha. Anyways another cool thing with the ward, we've been making lots of goals with our "real growth stats" like retention, reactivation, melk p hood holders. So we made a goal in ward council to reactivate 7 members by march! And they followed through! they showed us where some of them lived and we taught 6 RCLA lessons (recent convert, less active) yesterday alone! We kicked butt yesterday. 7 lessons, it was a great end to kind of a crappy week of waiting for member to show us where people live and them never showing up hahaha. Okay. Last thing. Sorry this is such a short email. But. Yesterday we were in the office after church and we saw a cool video on lds.org. it was some music video by the "piano guys" for like o emmanuel or something like that. So. we put it on a cd and took it with us. We showed the video 3 times and taught 2 other lessons on Luke 2 and christmas and got to teach about the real meaning of christmas... It was really cool. The video really brought in the spirit strong. There's a part in a video where christ helps a man up, and the man hugs him... I felt super warm inside when i saw that and thought... dang... I wanna hug Jesus!! But. It just helped me remember the many things he's done for me! Being halfway around the word during this christmas season is... weird and a bit sucky... and definitely wet and kinda doesn't feel like christmas other than guys selling crappy plastic trees on the side of the road. BUT. It's okay! I can take courage in the fact that i'm doing something that Christ would have me do... I'm trying to give back to him, by bringing people unto him. Every day we should try to do something to give back to him. So I challenge you all to sometime in this season figure out a present you can give christ, whatever it may be. I promise you all that you'll be able to feel his love. Anyways.. That's my spiritual side for y'all. Don't love what else to say. hope you like the pictures... oh yeah... 2 DAYS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! TRATRA NY KRISMASY!!! MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL!! i LOVE YOU ALL :) Stay sweet. Be good to eachother and drink some eggnog.

Be fitiavana,

Elder Roush