Elder Brody Jensen

We really have our hands full here and it's the greatest ever. One person we are teaching now is a young woman named Paula-Ann or goes by Apple. She has a baptismal date for August 5th and has been taught everything. We had the Elders in Mandeville come down for her baptismal interview. She's gone to church all growing up so she is one of the most prepared I've met. With her already knowing everything we will be teaching her a sort of mission prep because in the next year she hopes to serve a mission as well!  We also had some amazing lessons with our friends Crystal and Henry that I've been talking about for the last 5ish weeks. We taught them at the beginning of the week and Crystal invited herself to be baptized! She was so excited and giggly it was so cool and almost hilarious! Henry is just as excited but wants to make sure he is good for it so he wants to learn some more before he makes a date for baptism. There's a lot of other friends as well progressing

Well good ol' Elder Blackwood is off to Africa! He has grown so much and I'm honestly so proud of him. Imagine being recently out of highschool and jumping straight into the work of 6:30 to 9:30. That would be pretty crazy. Many miracles these last 5 weeks.   I got Elder MacFarlane, from Kingston, as a new companion and we are excited to get to work! The Lord must have known because the other Elders moved out and now we are combining both areas! Yeah, we are taking on a lot of people to teach and members to visit. I'm having deja vu from a few months ago, dang!  The largest thing that has happened this week is that Elder MacFarlane and I have decided to sacrifice whatever it is the Lord would have us give up to have the Spirit with us more throughout the week. We prayerfully wrote down a list of all these things and are fasting from them for 40 days. The one that pinched me the most was playing more sacred music on my guitar and giving up playing more secular songs. Man

Elder Blackwood is really turning it up this week! It is always so cool to see someone really take on change and do the best they can. It inspires me everyday!  We had an appointment with a member that sadly must have forgotten everything he's been taught or he never really was taught by the missionaries well. He had a lot of questions about everything concerning God, haha, but Elder Blackwood did very well by bringing out the scriptures he had been learning. He shared Helaman 5:12 in the Book of Mormon, which talks about having a foundation in Christ. He related it to building a house and the member enjoyed the message.  Later in the week we stopped by this person's home who also had a lot of unnecessary questions, haha. What was amazing about this appointment was that there was a recent new member who was in the area, with another one of our new members, and they both joined the lesson and absolutely took over, in a good way haha. We talked about the purpose of this life

This week was really exciting with the exchanges we had with other missionaries in areas nearby. First we went to Junction which was my very first area in Jamaica, that was over a year ago! We drove the hour and a half drive there, I dropped off Elder Blackwood with Elder Griffith and I took Elder Jacobs back to May Pen. We set some great goals for the next day and saw some awesome miracles as we tried to bring the spirit to everyone we met. There was this one street that we were going to walk and take a loop around back to the truck but we got stopped so much that we barely made it down the street when we had to turn back. Later in the week Elder Blackwood and I went back to the same area and met more people there.  Then we had exchanges with the other Elders in May Pen and I got to take Elder Fitisemanu with me and that was so good! All of these Elders just want to be the best they can and we all are learning step by step. We set some goals to try and teach families together with t