G'Day!
Thanks
so much for the
wonderful e-mail! I loved reading it and hearing about all the fun
things that happened over the past week. I'm glad that you enjoyed the
e-mail from last week! I don't know how many will be that long because
most weeks haven't been that eventful! Although they probably would be
to you, it just is same old missionary work things to us! This past week
was pretty good! We accomplished a lot of great things. However, the
weather didn't help much in our efforts because we had soooo much rain!
When we were out tracting on Friday the rain just became too much even
with our huge umbrellas. It ended up being one of the worst rain storms
I've ever seen! Melbourne weather seems to like to change its mind a
lot, so hopefully this week will be a nice and sunny one. Since we're on
Friday, we also had the wonderful opportunity in the morning to go up
to the Melbourne Temple with all the other missionaries (just the Elders
this time) in our Zone. It was a great
experience and very special seeing as we only get to go every 3 months
here. So that definitely provided us with a wonderful spirit and helped
motivate us to continue to work hard in this wonderful work. The
following day (Saturday) was a pretty big day for Melbourne because it
was the big Grand Final for the AFL (Aussie Football League), which is
the biggest sport followed by the state of Victoria. So lots of people
were talking about the game, and even though we didn't watch any of it
we probably had the whole game told to us by others anyway! haha. On
Wednesday we had a really great lesson with one of our investigators
named Rodney (I don't remember if I've told you about him before or
not?). We did kind of a different lesson than normal, where we had his
whole family come join us, who all are members, and then watched a
mormon message and following that had kind of a little testimony meeting
about how the Gospel blesses families. It went really well
and one of the best things was that we invited one of the less-active
members in the ward (the one I mentioned last week) to come out teaching
with us and we had him help us with this lesson with Rodney. He shared a
really great and powerful testimony which you could tell helped Rodney
to feel the spirit, and it helped the less-active member to feel the
spirit as well. So it was a two-in-one lesson in a way because both men
benefited from the lesson. Also, a couple days later when we went to see
the less-active member and his family again he said how he loved coming
out to teach with us and that he'd really like to help us out again! So
that was really awesome for us to see, and we look forward to having
him out with us again. We've been able to have some great news this past
week regarding Melissa and David, that being that they were able to
speak with Bishop Smith of the Pakenham ward and they're going to get
married! They don't know the exact date
yet, they're still talking about it, so it may be while I'm still in
Pakenham or it could be in a year, but either way we were both very
happy and excited for them because we know that they'll be so blessed in
their decision and also when Melissa will be able to be baptized after
their wedding. So they've been going really well still and are probably
our main people that we're teaching right now. On the other side of the
spectrum, however, we lost one of the less-active members that we've
been teaching since I first got here with Elder Rafferty. It was rather
sudden because he'd been progressing so much, especially lately, but he
just said that he was done with the church. So that was a bit
dissapointing but hopefully over time whatever has happened will
dissipate and he'll be ready to come back to church again. But every
time one door closes another always open if you continue working because
we have a new less-active member (and hopefully her
non-member family too) to teach. The member's name is Robyn, and she
was baptized about 8 years ago and has only been less-active since she
and her husband Inia moved to Australia. Now that I'm writing this I
think that I've already told you a little bit about them before, haha.
But anyway we just saw them for the first time in many weeks yesterday
and Robyn said that she and her family would be at church this next week
(fast Sunday for us) and that she'd like to be retaught the missionary
lessons to have her memory refreshed, so that will be really excellent!
Nearly all of our main people that we visit and teach now are
less-active members, which isn't a bad thing at all because the more
active members in the church the more missionary efforts can progress.
So a lot of our focus is there right now as we continue to try and
search out some new, strong investigators to the church. Also, I think I
forgot to mention that last week one of speakers in
Sacrament cancelled last minute so they called us and asked me to speak
in Sacrament meeting! So I had to pull a 'Dad' and basically do an
impromptu talk for about 12 minutes or so. That along with everything
else that we have to do speaking-wise on a mission has definitely made
me less nervous or afraid of public speaking! I just thought I'd share
that little note. Anyway this coming week will be busy since we'll be
having Zone Meeting again as well as interviews with President Lifferth,
so it should be good. Thanks again for the great e-mail and I hope you
have a fantastic week ahead! Talk to you again soon!
Love,
Elder Hopkins
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