Miracles from the Caribbean

March 14, 2022

Bonjour!

This was honestly a really good week! We had quite a bit of fun, and we saw a lot of miracles so all in all it was just one of those weeks where you look back and you just feel humble/grateful.

To start off, we had a really great experience Tuesday visiting a man named Gondo. We talked briefly on the phone a few times and we visited his apartament a few weeks ago but it’s been hard to get a hold of him. This time though he was home and when we knocked he invited us in right away! is from Côte D'Ivoire, and he actually is friends with a member in our branch! He met with the missionaries at least once in the past, and we were able to jump straight into the Book of Mormon and even find his old copy. He said he would start reading again and we have another lesson tomorrow morning so I’m super excited about that!

Also on Tuesday, we had a lesson fall through so we were able to stop by the young adult activity again to get in touch with  less active member who has been difficult to contact. I talked with him for a while and it turns out he’s actually in a band so I got to listen to some of his music and bond over my glory days of being in a band senior year (shoutout to East of the Cornmill)! We played “human tic tac toe” which was interesting and then we switched to a game called werewolf at the end. It’s a game that takes quite a bit of communication so it was pretty funny to do it in French but it was such a blast!

A huge highlight from this week though was that we got to have zone conference/interviews! It feels like just last week I was writing about our last zone conference, but that’s just how missions go I guess. This time we focused a lot on baptism/obedience and as per usual there were a lot of powerful doctrinal insights from Sister Harkness and some powerful testimonies and teaching from her and President. Another thing that was really fun was that the night before zone conference we got to host the Elders who live two hours north of us in a small town called Alma. Their names were Elder May and Elder Chadbolt are both from Alberta so it was fun to be surrounded by Canadians for a night and they had some pretty funny stories from time in the backwoods.

I really don’t have a ton more time so I’ll just skip to Sunday since it was really great! We ended up having three friends at church! One of them was a guy who had been taught in the past but had had a following with the missionaries, but texted us out of the blue a few weeks ago and we were finally able to get him to church this week! As we’ve been texting he mentioned that he really loves art, and when he came to church he also brought two of his art pieces to show us in person! We also got to sing with “If the Savior Stood Beside Me” in French with the Hermanas and the Sister missionaries in Relief Society (our church’s women’s organization) to celebrate its 180th anniversary which was a ton of fun! It felt great to sing in a choir again!

The biggest miracle this week though was getting to finally meet with Jay who I mentioned a few weeks ago. I knew it was a straight up miracle that we had been led to his door weeks ago, but we hadn’t been able to meet until we stopped by again Sunday night. He let us right in and we made a little bit of small talk until he pretty much just asked “alright, what have you got for me?” So we were able to just jump straight into explaining our church and that we have the restored Gospel and he was really interested! Like I mentioned, he is from the Caribbean and he started visiting a lot of churches when he was younger trying to find what was true and now he is interested in coming to our church and he wants an English copy of the Book of Mormon! 

Love you all,

Elder Jackson