Riley in Africa : Instrument in the hands of God

This week I would love to let you into the lives of a few of the investigators me and my son have found. One day back in the second week my son was here, that is like two months ago, we were walking and I saw a young woman selling some rice and cookies on the side of the road. So I felt impressed to give her a brochure. We give out tons of those things every day. It wasn’t special, we gave it to her and she said she sold there every day so we could stop by whenever, so we left. When we were planning, we decided to pass by where she was selling just to see if she was really interested because as I explained before most aren’t. We stopped by and she said she had read the brochure but was kinda sad that she didn’t have a Book of Mormon to really understand everything. So we gave her one, next time we came back she was asking all sorts of questions about Nephi’s story. We started passing by more often and we found she lives with her boyfriend and they aren’t married. However the boyfriend was super open to our message too, and before we knew it she started coming to church she has been coming for a month now and the boyfriend just came this last Sunday. We taught them the importance about the law of chastity and the boyfriend now works form morning till night every day to save money to marry the girl so they can get baptized in our church. And it all just started with a simple act of sharing a message.

I often focus on the crazy events that happen in this place, and I have many stories I will continue to share because I know it’s interesting, but I just absolutely love the perspective I get about the gospel of Jesus Christ while teaching it to people here. Everyday I spend hours in the sun walking incredible distances for what? because I have been called to be an instrument in the hands of God and what good is a rake if it has a mind of its own and does whatever it wants. I work to substitute my will, my thoughts for the will and thoughts of God. And it’s an amazing thing. I’m not perfect but I love this work. This week we were able to give the Book of Mormon to a guy who had been searching for it for over a year asking everyone and we happened to find his number and call him and we walked for an hour and a half to finally find him and bless his life with the truth. I know what I’m doing is right, and I love what this gospel can do in the lives of people. I’m feeling all spiritual this week because we had zone conference.

Some weird things this week, I saw on a bumper of a car “Bernie 2016” which is weird I don’t know why a Togoley would have cared about the US election. And also we pass buy a bum every day when we go out to the sector, he sits under a tree and smokes cigarettes all day. Where he gets the money I don’t know, but the other day he was laying down and his pants had a huge hole in the crotch area, like so big you could barely call what he was wearing pants, and he had no underwear on, so sadly I saw things I never ever ever ever ever wanted to see.

Apparently in the US after a year on your mission people burn a white shirt. I didn’t do that and when Bradshaw found out he quickly found an old shirt of Kadima and burned it in honor of my one year mark, so nice of him.