Elder Will Murdoch-Ft. Worth Texas Mission

Well, this was my last week in Africa and on Wednesday I'll be in Stephenville so I'm super sad. But that's life and apparently Stephenville is the cowboy capitol of the world BREATHE: Elder Holland did indeed come on Tuesday. After hearing some seventies and their wives speak Elder Holland started his talk. It was very quiet and muffled he told the story about how he got a call at work from the hospital that they were trying to save his wife's life. He raced to the hospital and burst in the room. Sister Holland was on a bed with tubes everywhere. There were doctors frantically rushing around he said he was mortified but then he saw a ray of hope. On top of Sister Holland was a 100lbs nurse pounding on Sister Holland chest commanding her to breathe. Then he leaned into the microphone and pointed at us. "THAT'S WHAT I NEED FROM THESE MISSIONS. BREATHE!" He got on our case for not understanding how important our calling was and encouraged us to be ...

How close are you to Christ: A few weeks ago I mentioned Zueni, who we met while tracting and how she didn't like us because she thought we were JWs at first but then she warmed up to us. Frankly she's been amazing to work with. She's absolutely loved every doctrine we've taught her so far and she loves coming to church. She couldn't find conference in Swahili so she just watched all 5 sessions in English, she had almost no idea what was going on. She's also opened up a ton about her family and life back in Africa.  We decided it was high time she got baptized so we made a plan to teach her about the gospel of Jesus Christ with some members named the Okesola's. Brother Okesola is from Nigeria and was recently baptized, I don't know much about him other than he also recently married a member. We were teaching the lesson and it was going pretty good. Sister Okesola was using google translate to talk to her in Swahili because she aut...

English Elder Lyfe: A hastily organized blitz was put on this week. The Zone Leaders told me around 3:30 that they wanted to do one at 6 in their area so naturally running off of African time and back to back lessons we showed up at 6:40. We were assigned to tract out a complex next to one of our Less-Active members which we knew fairly well.  As always I was a little anxious when we began tracting but after about the 3rd door we knocked I loved it. We quickly realized that the English Elders are living the high life of comedic situations. The 1st door we knocked on had all this "I   Jesus" stuff in the window. We were talking all this good stuff we felt from the window and how she was probably super nice and even if she wasn't interested would still tell us where to go. We knocked, she cracked the door open and told us to get lost. It was hilarious. Literally the next door we knocked on a naked old man answered and also told us to get lost which was pretty funny bu...

Everyone is a snitch: Recently as a Zone we started a challenge of how many referrals we can ask for in a week. Not to brag but we've been doing pretty well on that and even though we didn't have much faith in people selling out their friends  and neighbors at first that quickly changed. We now know why Preach my Gospel tells us to ask every one for referrals. It's because EVERYONE IS A SNITCH. At first we only asked Africans for referrals and we saw moderate success then one day we asked these Hispanics using the only Spanish I could remember after taking it for 4 years tied in with words I pick up: ¿Africanos aqui? And they snitched on every African door for the entire block. White people and just non-Africans in general are also all to eager to help. One of the people we're teaching has started compiling a list of everyone he knows from Africa it's great. I thought the reason for all this unexpected help was because we were looking for a specific demographic ...

Halthom City Blues: For the greater part of this week we struggled with finding people to use a scriptural comparison:   "11 Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of [Africans]:  12 And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the [Africans], and shall not find [them]." -Amos 8:11-12 Despite the intermittent rain and (mercifully) cooler weather we grit our teeth and started knocking on every door we knew had Africans and every door around them. All down in a little place called Halthom City It was a Friday and for the past 2 weeks we had found no one, we were desperately trying to find someone anyone we could teach, we met a lot of cool English speakers but not one African. We would teach a tree if it spoke French.  We knocked on the door of a lady we had knocked about a thousand times like, I ...

Hey everyone, my email got deleted just as I was about to add pictures and I don't have time to rewrite it so here's a talk I wrote for Sacrament as compensation. Sorry! Good morning Brothers and Sisters et Bonjour á mes fréres et sœurs qui parlent français. My name is Elder Murdoch and I serve the French speaking people of the Stake. I love being a French Elder, but the downside is I don't get to work with the English majority as much as I'd like to. I'll take this as my chance to prove that I do, in fact, speak English  I was asked to speak on a scripture that I've been studying lately, "easy-peasy" I said "I read so many scriptures I've basically got every verse of the standard works to choose from." But after reviewing my recent studies I realized that  pretty much nothing I've read recently stood out as something I could give a 5 minute talk on. I realize that I could easily just  make something up and find a scripture e...

Chapaté Gestapo: We were in a refugee complex on Friday, we had tried to contact a handful of people but no one answered there was also a flash flood warning that was moving it's way west. It had been at the doctors office we were just at for Elder Shiday' s leg and now it had started to rain here. We were bolting to the car preparing to go take shelter until it was safe to drive. On our dash back I stopped to give a Nepalese lady a "finding faith in Christ" card but when I tried to talk to her she ran and got her son to translate. They wanted to know where the church was, it attracted a large crowd of other Nepalese people asking where the church was and what time the bus would roll by. When we told them there was no bus they were all disappointed and walked off except for one guy and a woman whom I presume was his wife.  The guy tried to practice his English on us but he didn't speak much and then he would tell us a joke in Nepali but we wouldn't un...