On Sunday, we attended the general session of the Suame Stake Conference. For a Sunday morning, we were surprised at the traffic we encountered. At one point, not far past the Suame Ward chapel, we encountered a total stoppage. As we inched along for about 20 minutes, we could begin to see the problem. The road has four lanes, two coming into Kumasi and two going out of Kumasi. The traffic coming into Kumasi was quite heavy. The road is divided by a median and there are only certain areas where you can cross at intersections. A bus, traveling into Kumasi, had moved over into the two lanes going out of Kumasi. A man in a military uniform was walking in front of the bus, directing the two outbound lanes into one lane on the far right. Merging two lanes into one when both are packed full is a very slow process. To us, it seemed like a church choir in the bus, as everyone (both men and women) was dressed in some sort of uniform. The bus had no markings and as it crept along, it incessantly honked its horn in short beeps. I wish we would have taken a picture. I pulled a picture from Google Maps and you can see the road and the four lanes. We cannot imagine when that picture was taken as there is always a lot of vehicles going in both directions and in this picture vehicles are scarce. The interesting thing is that the experience provided me an object lesson for the short time I had to speak in the meeting. I simply titled my remarks, “No Shortcuts”.

I tried to use an AI image generator to depict what we encountered, but without much success. The picture below is as close I could get. Essentially a bus trying to go against traffic. I finally gave up trying to come up with the right words to draw the image.

While the bus was on our side of the road, it appeared that it was trying to take a shortcut to its destination. Interestingly the traffic on the incoming side where the bus should have been was moving much faster than the bus going in a counter direction in our lanes. In other words, the “shortcut” appeared to be slower and longer for both the bus and everyone in our outbound lanes. The scripture that immediately came to mind was 2 Nephi 31:21. “And now, behold, my beloved brethren, this is the way; and there is none other way nor name given under heaven whereby man can be saved in the kingdom of God. And now, behold, this is the doctrine of Christ, and the only and true doctrine of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, which is one God, without end. Amen.” Some of you may recognize the phrase from this scripture as the “Mandalorian Scripture”. A popular Star Wars spinoff where “This is the Way” is the motto of the Mandalorians. Don’t worry, they are the good guys. The point is that for those who want to be saved in the kingdom of God, there is only one name, one true doctrine, and one way to get there. There are no shortcuts, and there is no one who can “clear the traffic” and somehow find another way to the destination. Although there are plenty who promise to do just that – but you must pay them. While frustrated at the time, I was later grateful for the experience and the object lesson it provided.

Here are a couple of pictures of the sisters serving in the Suame zone along with two sets of elders that we took following the conference.

I will now back up to Monday, February 26th. Because of the travel to the North and the two zone conferences and many interviews, I was not able to do much with missionary letters, so I ended up spending several hours on Monday reading and responding to each one. Starting at 3 pm in the afternoon we had meeting after meeting. At 3 pm, I met with Peter Amoa-Ohenakwah, our northern FM. He does great work for us on new facilities and maintenance.

Following the meeting with Peter, we met in our mission health council. The electricity was out at the Loveland’s so they drove here to the mission home to join the meeting.

Following our Mission Health Council, LaDawn and I met with the Boateng’s (our successors). Alexander was in Accra and Anita was at home. We spent a little over an hour together and spoke about the Mission Vision, the 26 weeks improvement program, and the 12 week training program.

At 8:30 pm, we held the weekly Mission Leadership Council. We spoke about 1) Merging duplicate records in the Preach My Gospel App. 2) Making sure all of the missionaries understand the handling of baptisms for 8 year olds who are children of record but do not have a membership number. 3) The importance of not communicating with other missionaries in the mission (except as a leader). and 4) The transitioning of setting goals monthly instead of each transfer. It was a great meeting. I will mention that as we were discussing the intra-mission communication between missionaries, the spirit whispered to me that what we really give up when we do this is personal revelation. That is a profound truth that we are trying to help the missionaries understand.

On Tuesday, Feb 27th, we traveled to Asamang and participated in the district council where Elder Strother is the District Leader. At the end of the meeting, Elder Strother played guitar accompaniment for our closing hymn. The meeting was good followed by four interviews (I had done two before the meeting). We then traveled to Effiduase and interviewed the four missionaries living there and then stopped in Kwamo and interviewed Elder Frazier since he had recently been transferred and would miss the interviews later in the week out in Nkawkaw.

On Tuesday evening, I participated in yet another zoom call, this time with President Beeson, Ghana Accra Mission President, and President Morgan, Ghana Cape Coast Mission President. We discussed best practices in each of our respective missions in an effort to share ideas and counsel. It was great!

On Wednesday, we drove to Nkawkaw, Juaso, and Konongo, interviewing 16 missionaries along the way. We are grateful for this zone filled with faith-filled, dedicated missionaries. Elder Page and Elder DeGuzman are also part of the zone serving in Domeabra, but I had already interviewed them after the zone conference on February 14th.

Wednesday evening, I held our mission presidency meeting with Edmund Obeng, Joseph Asante, Elder Loveland, and Eugene Ghorman.

On Thursday, our interviews were in Bantama and started at 10:30 am. After two early starts, Thursday gave us an opportunity to get in exercise and morning scripture study. These are my favorite days! In Bantama, we interviewed 8 more missionaries and arrived back home at 2 pm (we stopped at Palace for some ground beef since it was on the way).

As soon as we returned home, we had a call from Augustine, the Kumasi Coordinating Council unit history coordinator. We had previously set up a meeting for an interview at 2 pm at the Mission Office about the mission and our experiences. He indicated that when a mission president is in his last 6 months of service, they do an interview. I suggested that LaDawn be included, but they said the guidelines were for the mission president only. I spent almost 2 hours with Gladys (asked the questions) and Augustine (videographer). Interestingly enough, on Sunday, Augustine approached us at the Suame Stake Conference and said they needed to come again because they needed to interview LaDawn as well. We will do that on Wednesday afternoon. It only makes sense! I had thought the meeting was at 4 pm instead of 2 pm, so we rushed back over to the Mission Office to meet them arriving about 20 minutes late.

On Friday, we made our last full-day journey for interviews to Obuasi. This time we drove down to Dunkwa and interviewed the missionaries at the Dunkwa 1 Chapel. Elder Flomo is serving there as the branch president (and doing an incredible job, I might add) so I was able to use the Branch President’s office where air conditioning was available. Now that was a treat!

From Dunkwa, we drove to the District Center in Obuasi and held interviews with 3 companionships. There were men working on installing CCTV cameras as a security precaution as we have had some significant thefts at the building recently. We are hoping this will solve the problem. Because of the workers, the district offices were open and we were able to use the “high” council room for interviews. I was hopeful because there is a nice A/C in the room. However, the unit was broken and so we turned on the ceiling fan and used the natural cooling of air blowing on perspiring bodies.

We then made our way over to Asonkore and interviewed 4 more missionaries. It is in the Asonkore branch that Elder Mba, my former Assistant, is serving as a Branch President and already making a difference.

On Saturday morning, I held a meeting with the District President’s and my counselors to review what we learned from Elder Bednar, Elder Kearon, and Elder Godoy last Sunday in Accra. We had also had a coordinating council meeting on January 27th, so I also wanted to share two of the important topics we covered there (Bishop’s Interviews for Youth and Keeping Doctrines and Practices Pure). I have waited until now to hold the meeting because I wanted to get the new District President in Sunyani in place. Unfortunately, President Adu in Techiman needed to attend a funeral of a member and couldn’t join. But the rest were there. These are men of honor, integrity, testimony, and faith. It is a blessing to work with such dedicated disciples.

In the afternoon, I attended a meeting in the Bantama Stake. President Appiah had gathered all the missionaries in his stake (with my blessing) along with the stake presidency, and leaders from the elders quorums and Relief Society across the stake. The purpose was to discuss how the missionary work might move forward. President Appiah gave me a few minutes to speak before I needed to leave. I shared some statistics on the number of baptisms over the past year and the huge impact member referrals made in the stake in bringing souls to Christ. I love stake presidents who catch the vision of working closely together with the mission to gather Israel.

I arrived back home around 5:20 pm and at about 5:40 pm, the Loveland’s, Samuelson’s, and Pack’s joined us for a birthday dinner. LaDawn made some wonderful stroganoff and topped it off with molten lava cakes. It was almost worth turning 67!

In working with young missionaries, there are no shortcuts. We have to maintain quite a pace to keep up with them. We love what we see as these young missionaries plant the word of God deep in their hearts and begin to feel the swelling motions as the seed they have planted becomes a tree springing up in them unto everlasting life (see Alma 28:32 and Alma 33:23). There is nothing better than seeing a consecrated missionary feel the incomprehensible joy of bringing a son or daughter of God to the waters of baptism, as we gather Israel one last time, Together in Ghana.