Week 88 (Nivelles)

This week was jam-packed with stuff to do! It always helps when you have a car at your disposal.

Thursday and Friday were full of back-to-back rendez-vous, so we were racing from place to place trying to stay on schedule. We also ended up teaching most of them in English which was cool. It's kind of crazy how English has become the international language, almost everyone here in Belgium speaks at last a little bit of English. And those who tell you that they speak a "leetle beet" often speak pretty well. A lot better than American high schools teach French!

At church on Sunday Elder Van Den Berghe gave a talk, and it was really good! The only thing is that we'd forgotten about it until Saturday, so he was hurrying to put something together. Luckily, he works well under pressure. In his talk, he shared an experience we had earlier in the week during one of our rendez-vous. We were talking to this really cool guy who's an adamant agnostic. He says there's no proof there is a God, but there isn't any proof there isn't a God either.

At the end of the rendez-vous we asked if we could pray. He said yes, so Elder Van Den Berghe went ahead and gave one of the most heartfelt prayers I've ever heard. He asked the Lord to help our friend through his current struggles and to let him know that He is there. Immediately he said, "That's the end of the prayer." It was the first time we'd had someone interrupt a prayer like that. We weren't exactly sure what to do, but he thanked us for coming and wished us a good evening, so we left without even saying "amen." As we walked down the steps from his door, Elder Van Den Berghe shared that he had heard the Spirit whisper to him when his prayer was interrupted, "He's afraid." The Spirit had been so palpably present during that prayer that he was afraid God might be real.

Even though he had rejected it, he still felt the Spirit. Some may think it was a failure of a lesson because it ended in rejection, but the fact that the Spirit was there meant it was a success. Something you learn on a mission is that your success doesn't depend on others' agency, it depends on your own. If you do your very best, you've succeeded. God cares very little, if at all, about our accomplishments because what He cares about most is our heart. If the desire of our heart is to follow Him and do what He has asked us to do, it doesn't matter if we stumble while trying our hardest to do so. We are human, we fall. But God loves us. So He picks us back up, brushes off the dust, and lovingly tells us to try again. If our heart is in it, we will get there eventually. And the same goes for sharing the gospel: if someone doesn't accept our invitation, we didn't fail, and nothing is stopping us from trying again :-)

À bientôt!
Elder Wood

Waiting at the hospital for Elder Van Den Berghe's checkup (he had an ear infection)

District dinner out. Elder Karratti, Elder Rangassamy, Elder Darrington, Elder Thomas, Elder Wood, & Elder Van Den Berghe

A nice family emailed me a picture of Elder Wood & Elder Van Den Berghe meeting with them and their children

Food photo! Burritos from Chez WaWa, a "Californian-mexican restaurant in Brussels"

"Pretty windmills"

Elder Wood's science project. He asked us to order him the  pictured plug-in transformer and used that plus other supplies (including the pencil) to make himself a soldering iron! To be used to create a light-up LED Frisbee.

"A cute Duolingo story"