January 11,2016 - Mission Call Change

"Dear Elder Cox, you have been called to serve a mission in the IDMM... You will now prepare to teach in the Swahili language as well as English and will be serving the African community."

Alright they didn't actually change my call but I am now a Swahili speaking missionary. Starting this week I will have 60 minutes of studying the sweet language of Swahili! I'm super excited and I don't really know how we're going to do it President Jensen just said we'll figure it out. So far all we've done is check out a Swahili-English dictionary from the library and we have Swahili pamphlets and Book of Mormons so we're going to start there!

I wish we were having African weather here too but sadly we're not. A member told us it got down to -36 the other night and its chilly out there. January 9th was a big day for me because it was the first day I wore a scarf in public out proselyting. 

On Thursday we had our Christmas Zone conference and it was hilarious. Each district did a 3-5 minute skit about a Book of Mormon Story and there was Elders reenacting the daughter of Jared dancing in front of Kind Akish, doing the whip of course. To a missionary version of Moroni writing to Pahoran complaining that they were hogging all the cute sisters in the land of Des Moines and not spreading the love to the rest of the mission. In ours I galloped behind Captain Moroni the whole time clacking coconuts together like in Monte Python. There were some super creative ones they were hilarious!

We also got to watch Ephraims Rescue for Zone conference and I've never seen that before so that was sweet. 

We had a couple families at church this week which was awesome! And the Cedar Rapids ward is awesome and super loving so everyone felt super welcomed. Diana and Johnathan and Jaheim are especially doing super well. Johnathan and Jaheim are the 13 year old twins and they are STUDS both in life and in the gospel. They're going to be baptized in about a month.

The gospel is love and happiness. It brings love and happiness into peoples lives in a world where love and happiness are only dreamt about. I have a firm testimony of that the last couple weeks. The gospel changes peoples lives if we open our hearts to it and allow the Lord to guide us from there. 

Mungu Aku Bariki (God Bless You)

Elder Cox