The Last Interviews, First Mission Council and Lots of Meals

In the past ten days  Brent's done a hundred personal interviews with about 100 missionaries. These are the most important things that he does and also one of the most exhausting.  It's where you have to talk to the naughty ones and encourage the sad ones and listen to the health concerns of the sickies, etc. etc.  It's also a time to share the joy of being a good missionary as he meets with faithful, devoted elders and sisters.  I think that the missionaries look forward to this time, but this picture makes it look like the 'hot seat.'
While Brent's doing the interviews I do a little teaching. This time it was how to help the less active. I showed a great video and then we had a discussion. It's still challenging to me to do this kind of thing in French, but we work together and I think that they get the message. We always get a little time to just enjoy them too.

 

All Seminary and Institute coordinators in the DRC were in Kinshasa this week for training and our dear friend, Monga from Lubumbashi, called to ask if we could see him while he was here.  It was he and his wife who met us at the airport in Lubumbashi when we arrived and generally shepherded us the entire time we were there.  They also came to General Conference in April 2011 and came to Ryan and Linsey’s house to go with us to Conference.  We took him out to a hotel restaurant for dinner ( we had just fixed too many meals that week to do home cooking."  We spent the evening laughing and reminiscing together.

In addition to all the interviews, we had lots of visitors and meals to fix.  We had our first mission council on Friday.  There's a new calling in the mission. It's for sisters and is called Sister Training Leaders. They meet with the zone leaders in a council held monthly.  It's quite a change for the elders to have sister leaders and they had lot of questions.  It was a good meeting. There's a big group now and it about fills our great room to hold the meeting there. We had the meeting, including lunch for 26.  It pretty much filled the great room.

Then that night we had the couples come for dinner to share an evening with the Elder and Sister Renlund.
That made a total of 40 people that we fed that day.  The meeting with the Renlunds was wonderful. They're such great people.  There was a great spirit there and our couples were greatly edified to have been with them in this personal setting.  We'll  really miss our association with the Renlunds.  They've been woven into the fabric of all of our 4 years of missionary service and that relationship is very dear to us. 

Then on Sat. we hosted a dinner for Bishop Gary Stevensen, the presiding bishop and Gary Porter from SLC. The Renlunds, Georges Bonnet, area Director of Temporal Affairs, Eustache Ilunga, Kinshasa Service Center director and Francois Kazey-Anfo, a church employee were with us. We've had the chance to meet with a lot of really wonderful people during our little dinner parties. During the dinner Francis, who is Georges Bonnet’s assistant, shared his story.  He was baptized in Ghana as a young boy in December 1978, just six months after the announcement giving the priesthood to all worthy males.  He said that 129 people were baptized that day and that they were lined up to wait their turn to go into the water.  The stories of the church in Africa are simply amazing and we are blessed to have seen many of the miracles that have taken place here. During the dinner Bishop Stevenson asked Brent, “What did you do in the pre-existence to deserve an assignment like this?”  We truly feel  fortunate to have spent this time in a place where the Lord is hastening the work and the people are so prepared to receive the gospel.

Bishop Stevensen had held a meeting Saturday for YM and YW.  Was he to hold that kind of a meeting in Tempe, how many YM/YW would attend?  In Kinshasa there were 1119 youth in attendance. At the end of the meeting President Renlund invited anybody who was interested to come and shake the hand of men who'd had the opportunity to shake the hand of the Prophet and the Twelve Apostles.  For more than  30 min. the youth reverently came forward to shake hands with  Bishop Stevensen and Elder Renlund.  What faith there is here in the DRCongo!

We also had dinner for one of our friends from South Africa, Steve Wrench.  He's in charge of distribution and was here with the area car czar, Francois Nortje, to do some training.  It's such a great change to have these good people from South Africa Area office come to see, train and supervise our service center. We have good discussions over dinner and have made some really good friends.