Mission Monday

Oh, how I love hearing from these boys!

They email on Mondays, but due to the time difference between here and halfway across the world, I get emails late Sunday night. If they ate getting to the Internet cafe (or cyber, as they call it in Madagascar), I'll start getting emails as early as 11 pm Sunday night. Sometimes I'm still writing to then at that hour, if our Sabbath had been more busy than normal, or if I've just been slow in getting to writing.

More commonly,  I'm already in bed when I hear my phone make its happy little "you have mail" sound. Then I have a decision to make. Do I smile and close my eyes and have happy dreams about my boys, saving the letters to read until the morning?  Or do I go ahead and indulge, reading by dim smartphone light, knowing that now it will take me forever to get back to sleep?  I've done it both ways.  Honestly, there isn't a better way to start a Monday morning and a new week than by reading letters from my boys.

From South Africa:
Well, this week has been a baptism by fire for me here in Hermanus. It has been jumping into the deep end headfirst. But at the same time it has been fun and exciting. The area here is doing good and they are doing well. The branch is primed for missionary work and things are starting to move. We have a baptism that is planned for the 24th, and the guy who is going to get baptized is a stud. We have also found a few families that are wanting to hear the gospel, and several of them we found through the members here. I love it and it really is amazing. 

From Madagascar:We were going up this path and a bunch of punks were walking down towards us and yelling at us. They got in there way and seemed like they wanted to start a fight. So we just walked through. One of them jumped right in front of me and made me stop. He took a nice big breath from his cigarette and tried to blow it in my face. Jokes on him, I'm 6'6" and he's probably like 5'4"--Elder Glazier made him look tiny--so he ended up blowing smoke on my tie knot. We just walked away and didn't do anything but part of me really wanted throw him down with his little buddies. So that brings us to our Malagasy Morsel for the day: faharetana. It means enduring, but it also means patience. I kind of like how that works: enduring to the end becomes being patient to the end.