Nepalese Miracle:
"I feel like we're running in place," I said to Elder Alleman on a rainy Friday morning, "we go all over the place and talk to so many people and yet, I feel like we aren't doing anything."
We had spent that morning in a typical Texas torrent walking through apartment complex after apartment complex trying to find people that hadn't been contacted in years. They were few and far between and literally every person we had spoken with that morning spoke Kinyarwanda or Sudanese or they only spoke Swahili (we are not good at Swahili) and so we were incapable of teaching them.
The week itself had not been great either. We had planned to set a lot of baptismal dates and every person we had planned for decided to stop progressing all at once. We had expressed several times that we felt like we weren't doing enough. We were a little discouraged.
The rest of the day was looking pretty grim too. We had a lesson with a "professional Evangelist" who told us that The Bible says that God comes in 3rd place on the list of priorities behind work and family. We showed him 3 Nephi 13 about "laying up treasures in heaven" and he was not happy. He preached to us for a while so we were late to our dinner and then we were late to our next lesson. I wondered if we were truly doing The Lord's will and making a difference. So we said a prayer and asked for a confirmation that what we were doing was helping someone.
We went to a Less Active's apartment, we go to that complex, especially that complex a lot. They're less active because they have to work on Sundays and they can't afford to change jobs. There are always a lot of Nepalese people in that complex but they all either say they dont want to talk about Jesus or that they don't speak English.
As we were walking to this apartment, Elder Alleman asked a Nepalese man if he wanted a picture of Christ. Without looking up from his phone he said, "No thanks boss." Nothing surprising about that. Right by the Less Active's apartment are some stairs where 2 Nepalese women always sit, they're nice but they never speak to us in English.
We knocked on the door of our Less Active but no one was home. We hung our heads in disappointment when we heard, "Hey boss my friend wants to know about what you do."
The same Nepalese man was motioning for us to come over and talk to one of the Nepalese women on the stairs. In near perfect English she says, "I always see you two around here and you always offer to talk to everyone about Jesus, what else do you do?"
We joyfully explained about the Gospel and the Book of Mormon and she said she was super interested she asked nay, demanded for a Book of Mormon in Nepali. And we learned 3 things:
1. We are doing something
2. There are people from all religions who are interested
3. They teach English in Nepali schools so the "No English" card can't be played anymore
Finding Nimely:
An abridged story of one of our members stories. We asked him about how he's exercised faith. Bloh Nimely was a teenager during the war in Liberia with his girlfriend, Gertrude. Due to his thick Liberian accent we can't really understand the details of the horror he saw during the war, needless to say, it was bad and all of his siblings were killed. They fled to the Ivory Coast with his parents and lived in a refugee camp when he was 19. One day Brother Nimely went to the other side of the camp to see his parents and when he returned, Gertrude and his one year old daughter were gone. They had gotten shipped off to America.
I imagine at the time there was much weeping but Brother Nimely didn't get into that.
He said he spent the next decade scrapping and saving selling used clothes on street corners. He said even when times got tough he had faith that God would allow him to come to America and see his girlfriend and child again.
He came to Texas in 2014, found and married Gertrude and they now have 4 children.
The title was Elder Alleman's for the movie we want Spielberg to produce about Brother Nimely's life.
You don't remember my name:
None of our investigators can remember my name. None of them, can pronounce it when they read my nametag it's always "Murdoshay" or "Murdosh" or "Mursh" if they don't read it they just call me "Brotha." Then the other day we met a guy who said it right AND remembered it. Miracles.
Love y'all,
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