September 3, 2012

G'Day!

Hello once again! Thanks for the e-mail! It's been a wonderful week, and seeing as it was the last week of the transfer we worked extra hard and were blessed with so much success! So to start off I'll just let you know of the transfer news. So this past transfer will be the last one that Elder Rafferty and I will be companions! Elder Rafferty will be going and I will be staying in Pakenham! I'm so happy that I'll be able to continue to serve in this area because I love it so much and there is so much work to be done and a lot of exciting things are coming up in the near future! Usually you don't find out where your new area is until transfer meeting (which is tomorrow morning on Tuesday) but Elder Rafferty actually just found out that he'll be leaving to serve in Tasmania!! So that is really exciting for him and I'm sure he will love serving down there and continue to have a lot of success! So on Tuesday I will find out who my new companion will be so that will be pretty exciting to see! Whoever it is I'm sure they'll be great! So anyway, back to the week. Going all the way back to last Monday on P-Day, Elder Rafferty and I actually got the great opportunity to get a ride from a member in the ward up to a place called Healsville Sanctuary. It's like a zoo but with all the indigenous animals to Australia, so it's really cool! We got to see all sorts of cool animals, and I'll include some of the pictures of them. Unfortunately my camera battery died like halfway through so some of the animals I was unable to get a picture of so that was too bad! Again this week we were able to have a lot of success in finding new people to teach. A lot of the people that we've been finding for the past 2 transfers as a whole haven't been too solid and only a couple of them are we still teaching. However, we don't get discouraged because there's a cool little statistic thing that I heard that goes something like: For every 1000 new contacts (or people to go and see for the 1st time) there will be 500 new investigators and out of that 100 progressing investigators and from that 10 baptismal dates and ultimately 1 baptism. So just because we may find heaps of people and then none of them turn out to be very interested we should just try keep trying harder because that person who is ready to be baptized may be that 999th or 1000th new contact that we find. A cool experience that happened this past week was there was a new guy that moved in to the ward boundaries within the past 2 weeks who is a less-active member. He is origionally from Taiwan and served a mission as well! We went and visited him a couple of times after we found out he'd moved in and then we brought him out teaching with us on Friday. The first lesson we had was with someone who we were going to see for the first time. Her name is Anne and in another house she used to live in she was actually visited by missionaries before! So when we went in to teach her we just kind of started off normally and then when Daniel (the new move-in) introduced himself he started talking about when he joined the church and then bore a really powerful testimony which brought the spirit in so much just right from the start. And then because of that spiritual environment we were able to extend a baptismal invitation very smoothly and more easily, and she said that if she found these things were true she would be baptized! So that was definitely a great experience for us! Church was really great this past Sunday and one of the best things about it was that Edward, if you remember him from several weeks ago who we'd kind of lost contact with, was able to come to church after we'd finally gotten to see him again and invite him. He had a really great experience there and is thinking about coming back again so hopefully he'll be able to be progress again in the Gospel. The past 2 days have been pretty hectic because we've been trying to see everyone that we teach and all the members we're friends with so Elder Rafferty can say his final goodbye's to them. So we'll jump right back into that after we've finished our e-mails! I hope that you've had a wonderful past week as well and that you all have a great week ahead! I'm looking forward to all the exciting things that will be happening including finding out who my new companion is, although I am sad that Elder Rafferty will be going! But I'm grateful for all your continued love and support, we've so many blessings and miracles here in Pakenham and I know without a doubt that a lot of it has come about because of all of your prayers. Anyway, thanks again for the e-mail and I'll talk to you again soon!

Love

Elder Hopkins