Tonga!

Sunday, April 6th,

Wow, this has been quite a day. Another one of those “Only in Tonga” days. All this weekend I just had a feeling that we weren’t going to have anyone ready to teach Relief Society today, so I put something together about General Conference -- just in case. When we got to our presidency meeting today, I found out that I was right and that I would be teaching. Bless Sister Matilae’s heart. She could have called me!!

Our Fast Meeting was really good today. We had a man who was visiting for the blessing of a baby, bear his testimony. He used to be the secretary for the King, King Taufahau Tupou IV. He was the King when Alan was here on his mission. Anyway, one day Elder Groberg and Elder Shumway went into his office and asked him to set up a meeting for them with the King. He did and then he accompanied them to the meeting to be the talking chief for the King. The Elders talked to the King about the church in Tonga and this man said that what they said went straight to his heart and he knew it went to the heart of the King too. The King could not join the church because he is the head of the Church of Tonga, but this man did join. He claims that the King new from that day on which church was true and he felt like it would be easy for him to make the change in the next life. It was pretty interesting. Then he thanked us, calling us by name, Elder and Sister Webb, for sacrificing so much to come to Tonga. He has lived in America for a long time and he said that he knew what we had given up to come here. We were touched, we don’t even know this man.

Our Sunday School class went very well again today. We continued to talk about repentance. We have some class members that are very interested in the steps of repentance and they ask a lot of questions. It was good. If they are working through some problems we hope that our lessons can help them with the right process and the right information. We had a young married couple, Joseph and Josephine, who haven’t been in class for the last couple of weeks. Josephine was at church today but she cried all the way through Sacrament Meeting and then she left. They are having some problems and she is heartbroken. We are so sad about that.

Relief Society turned out great. The lesson went well and lots of the sister participated. All is well. On the other hand, Priesthood went a little crazy. The Elder’s Quorum President has moved to Australia and they haven’t called a new one. The High Priest teacher was sick today so after the opening exercises the councilor in the bishopric said, “Well Elder Webb, you take them.” They combined both groups today and left all of them with Alan. He just had to punt! We had taken some small bottles of oil with us to our Sunday School class so that the men could concecrate them and then take them home. Alan had one left so he showed the men how to concecrate oil and then talked about the duties of the Priesthood. It turned out great. We are both so grateful for the promptings of the Spirit.

We had meatloaf and ufi for dinner. Ufi is the King’s favorite food. It is a lot like a potato, only it has no flavor. I gues if you have grown up eating it, you like it that way, but I have to put butter and seasoning on it. The texture is really quite good it just needs to be dressed up a little.

After dinner we went for a walk. The moon and the stars were out, it was a beautiful night. I love to look at the stars at night. They are so different from the stars we are used to back home. It is fun to try to find some of the constallations that we are not so familiar with. There are not a lot of lights on at night here so you can see them very easily.