Ganesh Festival (The Elephant One)

September 4, 2016
Hey y'all,

This week wasn't too special, I think the main excitement was David came to church, what a coincidence that he came on the day he was originally scheduled for baptism. At the beginning of the transfer (5 weeks ago) we were expecting to have about 2-3 baptisms yesterday, but that did go as planned. We taught more less actives than investigators, and our teaching pool of progressing investigators has been dropped significantly.

Ganesh Festival is like Christmas, but with Idol worship. They are celebrating his birthday. Man is it about to get crazy up in here, today we are on lock down, so we have to be in all day, but because its P-day we have a little room to do things outside. The whole festival (about 12 days or so) we can't where our tags or ties, which sucks, And for a couple days we're gonna be wearing normal clothes. My dream to proselyte in flip flops can be achieved! They make these huge clay ganeshes and paint them (which honestly looks pretty cool looking) and then take them to different areas. They have built a bunch of tents up around the area (even right outside our apartment) and yesterday a bunch of trucks with ganeshes in the back were taking them to all the different locations. From my understanding a bunch of people will be in the streets and traffic will be much worse. 

This week we taught a lot about repentance, and when I was on my exchange with Elder Patten, one of our less actives asked us what is the difference between our church and all the other churches (besides priesthood authority and the full gospel/Book of Mormon etc) and we told her it was change. The church requires us to become better, not saying other churches dont, but we all have callings and responsibilities that we have at church that allows it to function. Elder Shuman and I later taught a less active the difference between change and repentance. Now they, to most people seems the same. But to me I saw change as a temporary thing, where we change our behavior, or our actions vs repentance which is not a temporary change, its where we change our nature. When we repent truthfully thats when we hopefully) become more Christ-like. The only way we can obtain Christ-like attributes is when we repent. I felt like we had a great lesson with that family, and we committed them to come to church. They awkwardly didn't show up, but hopefully they felt something. 

We made no back cookies with the Shammugams, I dont think they really liked them except the father. In India they feed you till you wanna die, so we got pay back, by making sure they had a nice sized helping of cookies.Other than that, it was a normal week here in Hyderabad India.

Love,

Elder Magnusson​