My Sacrifice for the South Sudanese Family

     This has been a pretty uneventful week. For the most part we just followed up on those who we had meet some time back. The high bros (that's what my companion and I call them) that I wrote about this last week, went up to Gulu to visit family this weekend so they couldn't come to church. We were only able to see them once this week but we taught the Restoration to them this week and we left them with a copy of the Book of Mormon to read. By the time we left they were all fighting over who got to read it first. It was pretty cool.

     Oh I just remembered one cool story from this week. So a few weeks ago I wrote about a South-Sudanese family that we met some time back, well I have kind of a cool story about them. My companion and I were teaching a lesson with some other guys when It started raining supper hard. Honestly it was one of the worst storms that I had seen in a while (there was even hail coming down). But we had an appointment with the South-Sudanese family in about 10 min, and we didn't want to be late. So we finished the appointment and then walked in the pouring rain. the road that we were walking down had pretty much become a river but we traversed it anyway. as we were walking down this road we reached a part were erosion had completely destroyed the road and there was a small lake in the middle of it. But still we pressed on and I jumped the 5ft puddle in the road. Landing soundly on the other side I congratulated myself with an elegant fist pump and began to continue onward. Unfortunately I didn't make it far because the next step I took was into a sink hole carefully hidden in the road, and I fell chest deep into the muddy water. Crawling out of the sink hole I looked like a sad mess of a man, mud in my shoes, mud on my face, mud everywhere. As my companion walked around the sink holes and puddles we decided that so long as we made it this far we might as well just go to the appointment anyways. So I waddled over to the house of the South-Sudanese family. When we finally reached the home, the whole family was so amazed as us for walking through the rain to get to them, and then when they noticed me they were even more impressed at the sacrifices that we had made. I ended up siting on a towel near the entrance to their front door the whole lesson so that I wouldn't dirty up their home, but it still ended up being a really good lesson and I could see that they felt deeply touched that we had sacrificed to go see them. I could tell that by me falling into the mud and sacrificing my own body just to see them, I had left a big impression on them. That Sunday for the first time the whole family came to church as well, and I feel like a large part of what made them come was seeing the sacrifices that we made to see them. "By small and simple things are great things brought to pass" (Alma 27:6).

      Have a great week.

-Elder Grilliot