Week 68 Darrence was Baptized!!!! Hooray!!!!!!

Monday August 24th, 2015

What a week it has been!

It has been really hard and tough, numbers wise, but we went out and helped people come unto Christ and that is whats important.

A couple miracles this week was finding a long lost Nigerian brother here named Isaac who is a member but couldn't find the Church here in Malaysia. That was pretty sick.

We taught another lesson with Yin, and he still wants to learn and hasn't dropped us yet, another miracle! We finally met with a Less Active family who invited us into their homes and are the nicest people ever! We have another appointment with them next week. We went to the Talent Show.

So we were planning on just going knocking for 6 hours on Saturday but we got a call from Brother Ravi, from PJ branch, who scolded us for not coming to the talent show. We were telling him we needed to go out and find some new investigators so he said he brought a friend from Cheras to the KL District Talent show and wants us to teach them. We hailed a taxi real quick and got over there. That Talent Show was the best I have ever been too. All the missionaries from the whole District came to support the members and have a blast of a time. It's tradition for missionaries to come and support their home branches and go crazy, we were only happy to oblige. Elder Reynolds wrote and sang a song about his obsession with Emma Watson, soooooooooo funny, there was a 7 year old Michael Jaskson performing that was off the chain, Elder Dacayanan went crazy with his moves, Hindi songs were playing and piano performances, and even a Backstreet Boys remix (the missionaries haven't heard house music for awhile, it was way funny), and even a special guest performance by the missionaries. Brother Ravi hosted the entire thing so he called us up and we did teh Little Teapot dance. Soooo funny. The best was last though, Elder Reynolds and a Sister from Puchong branch sang "The Prayer". He sounded exactly like Josh Groban, I'm not kidding, it was perfect. Sooooooo good, blew my mind good. It was a fun night and the members loved us for being there. It felt good to relax a little and have fun in the moment... righteously.

Sunday was Darrence's baptism. Another beautiful miracle. I haven't seen one since last time in KL! Darrence was so happy and excited, and so was Fredric her son, who performed the ordinance. The Spirit was way strong there and the whole branch showed up, everyone was there to support her and her decision. Everything started to go wrong that morning, took us an hour to print the pamphlets, but God gave us some inspiration so we were able to do it. The font wasn't filled, so us and the Cheras Branch EQ grabbed buckets and coolers and everything we could and filled it up in 20 minutes. Another miracle. We had some mix up with the program, but Sister Vanessa stepped up and led us with some hymns, it was really great. The members of Cheras are miracles. Just a wonderful week, in which we got almost no key indicators. But so great to see God's hand in the work.

Mom wants me to share more spiritual experiences in this email, so I want to share something I wrote to President today on how I increased my faith this week.

All week this week we had time in which we wasted as a companionship and I was getting really annoyed with myself for being so lazy time and time again. I was getting so upset with myself. During EQ yesterday, we talked about Elder Jeffery Holland's talk from past conference. That sparked another discussion later in the evening with Elder Baker and I and we talked about the grace of God. I then started reading Believing Christ, which is about grace, while Elder Baker was doing reporting. I just thought to myself how unworthy I am, how much I don't deserve to be here. I don't deserve my wonderful family, I didn't deserve seeing and teaching Darrence to baptism, any other missionary and man could do it better than I, but that is the whole point. None of us deserve what we get here, the goodness we get. That's the beautiful mercy of Jesus Christ's grace, we should be falling into the depths of hell and anguish, yet we are still here. Jesus Christ went to hell and back to just be able to reach out to us and pulls us out of our misery. When I should be home now, doing who knows what, He has chosen me, helped me, blessed me, and saved my life so that I may do the best I can to be the tool to help someone else reach for Christ's extended arm. I know that my Redeemer lives and I now understand the gift of grace. That doesn't mean I will stop trying, I could go on all day why we still need to try, but it does mean that I never need to beat myself up. I felt an overwhelmingly witness of the Divinity of the Saviour and I know He lives.

I love being a missionary here and so grateful for God's miracles and blessings, especially the little things. Love you all!

There will be a massive riot this week in the city, so hopefully nothing will go down too much. If you don't know, Malaysian government lost 2.6 billion dollars from corruption and everyone hates the prime minister. We will see though!

Elder Holmes

And I just got a call from President, I'm going to be serving as the Zone Leader in Singapore back in the Toa Payoh Ward with Elder Middlebrook. Singapore has not seen the last of me!!!!! I will persevere!

Note from Mom: He had so many pictures he wanted to send but his camera wouldn't download. He says when he gets back to Singapore he will try again to send them :-)