G'Day!
Thanks
for the great e-mail this week!
They always are something that I look forward to each week and it
always makes me smile to hear about all the things going on. This past
week was pretty good. The work has been very up and down this transfer
seeing as the first week was a lot of tracting and finding and the next
two weeks were successful with a lot of lessons and people to teach and
then the past two weeks have been back to a lot of finding again.
Although our teaching pool and people to go see has grown so much since
we began the transfer. We had about 4 or 5 names the first week, and for
this week we have over 30 people to see plus a lot of less-actives
Bishop has asked us to visit, so we have seen a lot of progress and
blessings. This past week the only difficulty was catching people when
they were home. A lot of people were out of the house when we went
around to visit them and unfortunately with a majority of the new people
we have we don't have a phone number to ring so it's just
more trial and error with seeing them now. We were able to visit with
one of our new investigators named Emmanuel who's from Sudan. We were
able to teach a really good lesson to him about the Plan of Salvation
and he grasped and understood everything really well. He's married with a
few kids but he was the only that we were able to teach at that time.
One of his friends came by about 3/4 of the way through our lesson and
we were able to teach him a bit as well which was good. Also on another
note, this week isn't actually the last week of this transfer. With the
huge incoming of the new missionaries this upcoming transfer the dates
of arrival have changed a bit (note sure why) so the transfer actually
ends up being 7 weeks instead of 6. But I obviously don't have any
problems with that since Elder Rua and I are enjoying the work here in
Geelong. This week we also have Zone Conference again! Thankfully it's
not today but on Wednesday this time, but that
should be good. I don't think there'll be any General Authorities at
this one, however. This coming Sunday
is also Stake Conference again for the Wyndham stake, so it will be a
very conference-y week, haha. Yesterday, church was very good as well
because there was a return missionary from the Geelong ward that had
just gotten back off his mission on Saturday!
So he was able to speak to the ward and did a very good job. He also
wants to come out a lot with both sets of the Geelong missionaries so
that will be good to have an RM to help us out. His dad (who's on the
stake high council) spoke before his as well and his talk was excellent.
He was very emotional throughout the talk as he shared a lot about some
of his sons life and mission. It was a very spirit-filled meeting and
there were a lot of non-members that attended as well, so hopefully they
were able to feel the spirit there as well. On Saturday we scheduled 3
services to do with the other elders,
which were: cutting down an overgrown bush from one of the members
home, moving a big pile of bricks at an investigators home, and also
helping a member move into a new house. Overall the 3 services took
about 6 1/2 hours and we all felt dead afterwards because it was a lot
of hard work! We love doing service for people but we'll try to limit
the service to just 1 a Saturday from now on so we aren't zombies for
following few days. Elder Rua and I were pretty tired on Sunday but
still were able to sit up and listen in church but the other 2 elders
were fast asleep for most of the 2nd and 3rd hours, haha. Something that
I heard as well on Sunday that was a bit shocking was that the general
authorities had told all missionaries in England to stop tracting, and
also in the Perth Australia mission a few months ago. Some of the
members were saying that pretty soon all of Australia's missions will
have stopped tracting. I thought that was quite an amazing
change and I didn't hear why they had stopped it but it must be for
good reason. So the members are going to have to step it up to help the
missionaries, seeing as tracting is a big part of finding people to
teach. Thought I'd just share that, might be something interesting to
look up more about. Anyway, it should be another busy week ahead and we
hope to see a lot of success as we continue to work really hard to help
build up the area and strengthen the Geelong ward. Thanks as always for
the support and love you show that helps the work go better! I hope you
have a wonderful week ahead as well and Happy Valentine's Day! Talk to
you again soon!
Love,
No comments:
Post a Comment