March 31, 2014 - Beira

This week has just been a giant blur haha pretty crazy. Me and Elder Peckham ate some bad food at Muslim Mondays, just a restaurant here in Beira, and we both got pretty sick for a few days. Just now am I starting to feel all the way better.

      Now to the good part of my letter. So Last week I told you all about our zone plan to help people get to the temple and how excited we were to try out our plan and help families here in Beira get to the temple. Well this week we had interviews with President Kretly and we talked a lot about the plan and anyways he and the assistants this week took our idea of every dupla picking a family and helping them get to the temple and made it more organized so that now the branch presidents pick the families and a few other changes and our whole zone conference was about helping members do family history and getting them to the temple!! So everyone in this half of the mission received this training and next week everybody in the south will get it! It was super awesome! It really strengthened my testimony of receiving revelation.

     Anyways in my interview with President he asked me ‘Elder Bigelow do you remember how many families were being baptized when you first got here? Or even how many families we had here in the church?’ Very few..... We had to baptize families first and now we have to get them all to the temple. Since December of 2012 our mission has baptized 280 families! I feel like my group of missionaries was called to build the foundation and now they can start working on the walls and the roof and stuff. 

     The branches didn't split yet. I think we need to help strengthen the members some more first but our zone conference was nice. I had to direct and I was super sick the night before but during zone conference I was fine. At the end, Elder Lake and I, the only ones from my group up here in the north, got to bare our testimonies. It was a super crazy experience, we started our missions together and are ending our missions together. We both started crying and it was weird just thinking back on all that has happened the last 2 years. The funny thing is that almost exactly a year ago Elder Lake was in Beira 2 and I was in Inhamizua. This week as well Inhamizua finally has a member branch president and counselors!

   This week I am going to start giving stuff away and I will buy stuff to bring home when I get to Maputo. I already have stuff but I don't know how much you guys want me to bring home? Me and Elder Lake are flying down to Maputo on the 18th and Friday and Saturday we can go buy stuff and visit families - pretty much whatever we want.

    Well love ya guys

                  over and out

Elder Bigelow

Zone Conference in Beira