So many things to be thankful for...

 woah the week of thanksgiving has come and gone. the week started off pretty well and kind of set the note for the rest of the week. i had the chance to go on an exchange with a cool missionary from Guadeloupe. he has only been converted for a short time but he is such a good missionary. so they have an ami in whom i've taken a lot of interest because i had the chance to teach just one day. so this exchange elder bananier (translation in english is elder banana tree, that's his name!)  told me that we were going to a member's home to teach Landrine (his ami). i was super pumped and he asked me what we should teach and i was just like, the lesson of baptism of course. he didn't know what that was, mostly because i made it up, so i quickly taught him. now i will let everyone know that the lesson of baptism to this point went 5 for 5. it was batting 1000. we were all prepared and the members were prepared as well. Landrine came and we gave her the lesson and the spirit was so thick and she said she wasn't sure if she knew the church was true the first time, but no worries the baptismal lesson takes care of that. we had her all squared away and then she agreed to be baptized but the date wasn't sure. so we'll count that as a walk for the baptismal lesson. still batting 5 for 5. overall it was a great lesson. i've never seen a harder head than landrine and she still accepted. 

Wednesday we ended the exchange and headed straight to a rendez vous. this one was with our ami michelle who is a 19 year old guy and is super cool. we had a pretty good lesson where we just kind of reviewed the retablissment and it was like pretty solid. we asked him if he knew that all this was true and he said he didn't know 100 percent. we read with him a little paragraph on how we can know that it's true and he expressed some of the fruits of the spirit. Filled with the spirit and the baptismal fire from yesterday i pulled out the scripture that sets up the baptismal lesson and we set a date for the 20th right on the spot. thanks to the exchange i knew that the 20th was a friday and that's the day the ward does baptisms. if it hadn't been for that i wouldn't have had any idea whatsoever. exchanges actually are important. ha

thanksgiving was a good time to sit and enjoy but honestly the whole time i just thought about doing missionary work. we watched 17 miracles as a zone and it was really good but the whole time i was just thinking about all the people on the road who need the gospel. uh oh. looks like i'm going to be weird when i get home. oh well

Friday we had a nice little surprise as well. so michelle usually brings his friend aimé with him. we got a call friday from aimé telling us that he wanted to "sign up" for baptism. well we knew we could do that so on saturday we fixed a rendez vous and he came to sign up. we taught him the retablissment and he also was just feeling some strong spirit so we fixed the 2 friends for the 20th of december. it was super funny. i guess aimé actually went to church every week in the congo. he's awesome

the week ended with stake conference and this was a stake conference just a little bit special. 2 area 70's were there because they were calling a new stake president. during a meeting with all the adults in the stake they called up the zone leaders of brussels. this was weird so we went up in front of everyone and they gave the crowd 15 minutes to drill us with questions about missionary work and how members could do it as well. i was cool but my comp was really sweating. overall we did a good job in answering and it was pretty fun.

great week!

elder oliverson