We love Africa. It is the new frontier of the Church.

We went to the temple to do sealings. The session was about an hour long. Deanne and I were first up as proxies for a husband and wife who I had found. Then we did a family with a daughter. The proxy for the daughter was Sister Mensah, from Nigeria. The officiator was Elder Edward Dube, one of the members of the area presidency from Zimbabwe and a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy. What an amazing experience caucasian parent proxies with a black daughter proxy sealed by a black general authority. This family was from Kentucky in the 1700 and 1800s. Imagine how different life and the gospel are today from what they were in Joseph’s time. I attended Hawthorne Elementary, Lincoln Junior High and South High school in Salt Lake where we had probably the most ethnically diverse student bodies in the state but we could not have foreseen the changes and the blessings in the lives of all of us which comes from the blessings of the gospel in the lives of our brothers and sisters here in Africa. In conference President Uchtdorf said “don’t miss the miracle.” The miracle is here. The Africa West Area created one third of all of the new units in the church last year. It is on track to do more than that this year. We celebrate the restoration of the gospel in New York, Ohio, and Illinois. The restoration is occurring in the lives of tens of thousands of African saints each year. Don’t miss the miracle. Don’t miss the restoration; it is here.