Hey family! Howzit! It's going super well here!
On Monday we had family home evening with an American family. The husband works for the church and does a lot of training here for the church buildings, so that was kind of weird. It was my first time being around Americans that aren't missionaries. There's a few Americans in our ward which is cool. Anyway, they made us steak and cheesy potatoes and veggies and it was honestly one of the best meals I've had here haha. I didn't realize how much I missed a medium done steak. So flipping nice!
The week was pretty normal. We did a lot of driving taking missionaries from place to place, so we got to know the area pretty well. What we found is on the backside of Sandton, the really nice city, you go about 15 kilometers and there's the second biggest township in the world, Alexandra. We had to drive through it yesterday and it was ridiculous! There are so many taxis and they don't care about the law, and the stop lights were all out so it was just chaos. It made me a much more defensive driver haha. I'm glad I'm not serving there. To drive in that every day would be way too much stress.
Another cool thing about this week was we went into Young Men's last Sunday and asked if they could come teaching with us during the week. Most of them have never really gone with missionaries before, so it was pretty cool! We're going to work with them a lot and try to help them prepare for missions. I think altogether I went with missionaries twice back home, but it would have been nice to go more often. So we'll see how that goes!
Yesterday at church was sick! As we were walking to Gospel Principles, the class with investigators and recent converts, we saw this member and his wife walking with another couple, and they introduced us to Lana and Matthew. This member intimidates me just a little because he's like 6'5" and has a deep powerful voice and is a millionaire, but he was just like "Elders, these are the friends that we previously told you about." We thought, "Oh sweet!" Lana and Matthew are both in their late 40's and they were married, divorced, and are now back living together which is weird, but we'll work with it. Anyway, a few weeks back a member invited Lana, who's a paramedic, to come to the church and do a first-aid thing for the Relief Society. Lana noticed there's something different about the building and asked if she could come to church one of these Sundays, and obviously the member said yes so she finally was free to come yesterday! We went to the member's house later on for dinner with Lana and Matthew and were able to watch the Sunday morning session of General Conference which happened at 6 pm here. We talked to them a lot. They’re a super interesting couple, both are paramedics, the husband was in the army and has traveled all around the world so he had some cool stories. Lana has always been very spiritual, but she's never felt like she's belonged anywhere. She's been to basically every other religion -- Jewish, Muslim, Christian, always looking for a place where she belonged, but she's never found it. She has asked people in the past about the Mormons, and all she has ever heard is "They have multiple wives." So that sort of intrigued her, because she was confused why everyone had always said that. She was sort of thrown in the deep end yesterday. She came to church and the members basically gave her an overview of the restoration and then we watched conference. It was a lot at once, but she said that she has the same feeling watching conference as she does when she's at our church, so we told her that is the Spirit. Her son called and he had broken his arm, so she had to leave, but we set up a time to see her during the week. She told us "literally any day, even if you want to come speak with me at work it's fine” hahaha. So we are super excited because she's pretty prepared! Member referrals really are the best, and in Randburg the members are powerful. So it was a pretty awesome week!
I'll get to watch the rest of General Conference next week, but I think my favorite talk last night was Elder Eyring's about the Holy Ghost. For the first time in my life I'm actually really excited to get the Liahona with the conference talks and study them more. I think I just realize now how cool it is to have modern day prophets and apostles that tell us more commandments and give us more counsel and direction.
Love you all! Thanks for everything, talk to you soon!
Elder Savage
Ten of us elders went to an all you can eat sushi place on Saturday for $10. I ate 30 pieces of sushi, not sure if that's a lot, but this was us afterwards.
P-day!
