G'Day!
Thanks for
the e-mail! This 4th of
July week definitely wasn't as eventful as one in America but it still
was a great week! Elder Rafferty and I have been getting a lot of new
investigators to the church and new people to contact and teach so we've
been really blessed in that regard! One of our new people we're
teaching is named Melissa and she has a partner (or boyfriend) David who
is Samoan and he's also a less-active member of the church. She is from
Australia though and we've taught he twice this past week. She is
progressing at a very miraculous rate! She's already read up to Jacob in
the Book of Mormon, she's coming to church, and she prays twice a day
and together with her family (they have 2 kids). It's really amazing how
prepared she is by Heavenly Father. The only thing that will be
stopping her from getting baptized very soon is that she needs to get
married to David which I think they've already been planning on doing.
She shared with us an amazing experience with prayer that
really sparked her interest in learning about a religion. It was just a
couple weeks ago and she told us how her parents divorced a little
while back and that her dad hasn't spoken to her since. So one night she
just decided to try and pray to see if it really works and she just
asked God if she could know that her dad still cares about her. The very
next morning her dad called her up and said, "I don't really know why
I'm calling you right now, but I just feel like I need to let you know
that I do love you very much and hope that you're doing ok." I don't
think I've heard of many more experiences with prayer that were more
amazing than the one she told us (obviously she spent a little more time
telling it than I just did). So hopefully she'll continue to make the
necessary steps toward baptism. Also this week Elder Rafferty had to go
up to a leadership training since he is a District Leader, so Elder
Bisby (from my MTC district) and Elder Kryton (from
Canada, and he came out the same time as Elder Rafferty) came down to
Pakenham to work with me because both of their companions were at the
meeting too. So for most of the time they were here we all just did
tracting and GQ and amazingly we ended up getting the information for 12
people in Pakenham and then a couple for other areas in the mission,
which is higher than the standard number for the entire week! So we were
really blessed there and hopefully some of those people that we'll
contact will turn out to be good investigators. Yesterday was a pretty
big day for Pakenham because it was the first Sunday in the first LDS
church building in Pakenham! They'd just finished building it and it's a
lot nicer than having to drive 30 minutes to the other church building
in a town called Narre Warren. So there were a lot of people that were
able to come, from the people that we see there were 3 investigators and
2 less actives that were able to make it to
church! One of the speakers that came to our Sacrament Meeting was
actually a member of the Seventy. He happens to be in the 8th Quorom of
the Seventy, but still it was very neat! I'm constantly improving as a
missionary and I'm learning a lot from Elder Rafferty and I'm really
excited for this next week! The time is already flying by and I know
that I need to make sure I'm always working my hardest so that when the
time comes I'll have no regrets looking back on my mission. I'm very
thankful for all of the your love and prayers and support and I've been
very blessed so far here in Australia. I hope your week goes really
great and I'll talk to you again soon!
Love
Elder Hopkins
No comments:
Post a Comment