Tune my heart to Sing Thy Grace

6/22/2015

Emailing Jake.. everyone says he is at home... Not sure I buy it. #tupaclives

Thanks for emailing me though, it's always uplifting to read about what everyone is doing. As we learned yesterday in Elder's Quorum about being led by the Spirit, all of you do a great job of that, thank you!

It is a blessing that the revelation came to keep me in Tema, I feel like it has taken up till now to truly desire the welfare and happiness of the missionaries and to be willing to Sacrifice my proselyting time more for them. At first I was just doing it because I knew I was supposed too, now it is a blessing. I suppose some (myself) learn these lessons slower.

We gave one sister missionary a blessing and she was very grateful, I think she has some stresses getting to her. The spirit really did direct things that I would have never thought to say otherwise. They did well this week though and it seems the blessing was what she needed. Giving blessings is so great. We gave several this week to members and non-members. It really helped us be a lot more obedient and Christ-Like, knowing that we would later give blessings.

We had a lot of working with members the past couple of weeks, some interesting results. Some of the people we may ask the sisters to start working more with. Like a young girl who seems a little terrified to open up to us hahaha her family is awesome though. It's the Kufalor's neice. By the way, Ethel Kufalor had her baby! I predicted she would give birth to Yao (a thursday born) She did and so, after some debate, she asked for my first name and now the baby is named 'Logan Yao Nunana Cudjo-Deborah'. He is awesome!!!!!!!

We were blessed to have some great people come to church, Jerry's mom Gifty came, a referral who has been overcoming a pretty massive alcohol addiction named Martha.

After our zone meeting, which went on well, we followed our own council to see "if we had eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to feel" (A President Monson quote). We had all our appointments fall through and no where to go around 8 pm. So Elder Beckett said we should stop and pray. We did and started to open our eyes to his guidance. A couple roads down we met a sweet guy named Kwabena (my name sake in Ghana) who is a family man and pretty interested! We would have missed him without stopping to pray. Then as we passed a part member home, we felt to go back and didn't know why. We did though and found the non-member husband sick and we were able to give him a blessing. It was so sweet to be used by the Lord and I felt like we were really going about his business, not our own.

We were a part of the choir who sang for a lady's funeral in the church. As we sang "Come thou Fount" the words rang out for me "Tune my heart to sing thy Grace". What greater joy could we have than to be instruments in his hands?

I love you all from Ghana and back and to Eternity

Elder Van Wagoner