Hi,
So what's up.... holidays over and its back to school, that's fun.... And happy Australia day, I completely forgot about it until now.
So life out here is chill, so quite a bit of stuff happened since I last wrote. We have some families that we are teaching they are so sweet. Also living with members is such a blessing to experience, you just become apart of the family. Tebukei and Kaboterenga and their children (the family we live with) give their kamauri nakoimi.
Elder Anderson is doing well, has had some nasty looking boils but is healthy again, we actually were in Tarawa this week from Wednesday to Saturday so Elder Anderson could meet with President Larkin. We stayed with the east zone leaders who are Elders Ellis and Powell who both are MTC buddies. Super sweet working with them and seeing how much each of us has grown since the MTC.
Back on Abaiang we are trying our best to make a difference, so let me explain. So here on Abaiang there is a lot of religious persecution and I don't like it.
The Catholic father teaches that talking to missionaries is a sin... Helping someone from another church is a sin... He teaches that Mormon missionaries are Wolves, referencing Matthew 7:15. People while we are riding bikes howl at us and call us Wolves. Even little children. People who leave another church to become a member of the LDS church are made fun of and are known as being weak and poor not being able to handle the Catholic or protestant form of tithing.
Right now I feel that religion here in Kiribati is not fulfilling its true purpose which is to perfect the saints but instead is introducing intolerance and prejudice among its people.
Most church's here are Christian and believe in the teachings of Christ, the Christ who emulates the meaning of love and charity, however, they seem to fail to live these teachings. Even within the LDS church I have seen this problem.
So we felt that we as members\missionaries of the church of Jesus Christ we should be an example of what it means to be christian. So we decided to visit the minister of the Protestant church to address the problem of intolerance.
So we met with him and explained that we had an idea to do a combined service project, Mormons and Protestants, so that we could create friendships between people of different faiths. Also had an idea to provide pictures of the Savior for everyone to hang up in their house as a reminder of what it means to be Christian.
At first he was very hostile asking why we were really there and who sent us. But we cleared everything up and he said he would cooperate. He did express to us that he was unhappy with us visiting his "sheep" even naming particular individuals. However, its a good start in getting rid of this segregation.
Just hope that we can all remember that love for god and love for our neighbor's is the highest law (Matthew 22:36-40) (Moroni 7:46-48).
So yeah that's what's going down...
I love y'all
Elder Berends.
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