I Bless a Baby

Good morning everyone! I hope everyone is enjoying this absolutely fantastic Monday! This week was pretty legendary if I do say so myself. 

Last Monday we finally finished utterly destroying all the bedbugs in our apartment. Our mission apartment coordinator even got us new mattresses and box springs which at first I thought was a little overboard, but when we put the old mattresses in his truck we saw a couple of the bugs on them, and we literally fogged the place down like twice and sprayed it until we couldn't breathe. So we did it again, put bed bug covers on our new mattresses, wiped down everything in the room, put all the bedding in the washer and dryer again, and bam. We finally had a well-rested night, the first one in like 2 weeks and it felt amazing! 

This week I was able to go on an exchange with Elder Johnson who was actually in the MTC with me. We stayed in our area and it was a super awesome day! Something way interesting happened though. The day before, Elder Van Tassell and I were walking out of the building when the mom of one of our investigators came and talked to us. She said that her daughter had just had a baby, and was asking us if we could give it a name and a blessing. Now as two young elders who mostly just try to teach the restored gospel, we didn't have a lot of knowledge on how baby blessings work. Like we'd seen them in church but can you do them for nonmember babies? Can you do them outside of church? Does a missionary even hold the priesthood keys to do such a thing? We kinda just let it leave our minds and went on to work for the day.

Anyways that night we exchanged and Elder Johnson came here with me and we got a text from our investigator that said: "I will be expecting you here at 9:00 AM tomorrow for the naming ceremony. We will see you soon."....... We both looked at each other like "Oh dear." So we called Elder Van Tassell who has been around the Africans for like his whole mission and he told us to just say a special prayer with them and the baby. Don't use oil, don't give it a legit priesthood blessing, don't put your hands on its head, and don’t touch the baby at all because it's against mission rules. So... that's what we did haha. We went in the morning and there were a ton of Nigerians in the room and when we walked in they set the baby down and looked at me and said "Do you use oil?" I did my best to explain to them how we do baby blessings in church, but I was going to say a "special prayer" for their baby. So in my best Nigerian style prayer I could muster I said a prayer and I blessed that baby.

They gave me a paper with a bunch of names so I just read them all off during the prayer and they were all just doing their usual "amen." or "thank you lord" or "thank you Jesus" during the prayer. It was pretty awesome haha! I may have possibly done something slightly illegal and blasphemous but I really hope not! After the prayer I said "God is good" in Yoruba because we know quite a few words in their language because it softens them up big time when you speak it. They came to me and said "that will be the baby's name." So I may have named the baby even though they had me read like 5 names during the prayer. Afterwards they wanted to take pictures with "Pastor Jensen" and the mother and the baby and what do they do? Plop that baby right in my arms. Yes it is against the rules but what am I supposed to do, drop it? So they took tons of pictures with us and I may have illegally blessed a baby, and definitely illegally held the baby haha. Hopefully I have the keys to say a special prayer for a baby. I think so. They gave us some gifts for blessing the child including a bottle of jumex banana strawberry juice and a bottle of tea. The tea is still just chilling in the car haha. 

Later that week we were stopping by that certain family’s neighbors because we were teaching them and the door was open and they heard us knock their neighbor’s door. They opened up and said "come in!" and of course they were having a Nigerian party. They let us in and they had us dance and sing with them and then Elder Van Tassell said "let us pray" in Yoruba and they all freaked out from hearing a white boy speak their language. We said a prayer and they gave us some more pounded yam (white fufu) and agusi. Pretty exciting stuff but it's so spicy cause of those Jamaican peppers. They also gave us a drink called Malta (they all give us that) it's like this barley flavored soda, I will not lie, it is probably the worst soda ever and I don't even like soda in the first place! But now I've chugged down like 100 of these drinks and they are starting to just be like normal. They are such an incredible group of people and an awesome culture! Before we left we said “thank you” and “goodbye brothers and sisters” in Yoruba and they were literally flipping out. It was super awesome. 

The last highlight of this week was we found this African American family in the building who we started teaching, they are actually a little crazy not going to lie. It is a very small apartment with a husband in wife and their kid, who is married, and has 4 kids. And it literally has like a main room, and bedroom and a bathroom. It's meant for a max of two people. Every time we go they say "the church people are here! Mom, it's the church people!" It is definitely the most chaotic teaching environment I've ever been a part of. Every time one of the kids are yelling or something the mom yells, "shut up we're having church right now!" And of course they didn't come to church on Sunday because they see no need because "where two or three are gathered in my name there will I be also." Whatever, we'll get them eventually haha. It's been a blast teaching all those crazy kids and its pretty dang cool to be called "the church people."

That is about it for my week! More miracles happened as we saw some more of our friends come to church! We hit a new record of 46 lessons for the week and we are hyped to make this last week of the transfer a good one! Hope everyone has an amazing week! 

Elder Jensen

Some pics of the family we were teaching and a Nigerian party. 

Look how apostate and uncomfortable I look holding this baby haha