G'Day!
Thanks
for a great e-mail this week! It
was another good week in Geelong this week. We didn't see as much
success as we did last week but we were still able to accomplish quite a
bit. This past week on Friday
we had our quarterly interviews with President Lifferth where he
usually just asks how we're doing and what he can do to help us
accomplish the work more, but it's always good to speak with him 1 on 1.
He mentioned that Elder Hirata and his new companion were doing well in
Pakenham and that the new missionary is really good! So that was good
to hear! He also asked me if I felt they could fit 2 more missionaries
in the flat there in Pakenham and I told him yes so they may have 4
missionaries in Pakenham now! Wouldn't that be cool? We also saw that in
the next transfer there will be 27 new missionaries coming into the
mission! Wow! So the big influx of missionaries is beginning and right
now we're still at about 165 missionaries but President and Sister
Lifferth said by May we'll be up to
220. So it's definitely a very exciting time to be a missionary in the
Australia Melbourne Mission! We were able to finally teach Joel and
Camilla for the first time officially. We didn't teach too much as to
what we'd planned because Joel had a lot of questions about the Temple
and sealing of families. He had a bad experience with the Temple before
because when he and Camilla went to go see Camilla's sister get sealed,
no one told him why he couldn't go into the Temple so he thought there
was just a lot of secretive stuff that happened in there. We were able
to explain to him more about how the Temple is just a sacred place and
that you just need to have a Temple recommend to enter showing that you
are in line with God's will and thus will help maintain the purity of
the spirit there. We were able to answer most of his questions pretty
well but next time we'll teach him more in depth about the Plan of
Salvation and how the Temples and family
sealings fit into it. He still is very keen to learn more and said he
wants to put in a lot of his own effort such as reading the scriptures,
praying and coming to church and he said he knows that as he does it
will help him be able to receive answers and get a better understanding
of the Gospel, so he has a great attitude about it all. I've been
studying a lot differently lately as well in my personal studies each
morning. President Lifferth asked us in preparation for Friday's
interviews to pick a topic of Preach My Gospel that we wanted to learn
more about and then for a couple of days just really focus on that for
our study and seek a better knowledge and understanding of it. Before
I'd just study really basically a lot of topics at once and felt that it
would suffice, but when I did this I was able to learn so much more and
it made me more excited to study than ever before. So now I'm going to
continue doing that with all the principles of Preach
My Gospel and literally exhaust all the resources and scriptures I
can about that topic before I move onto the next, and hopefully I'll be
able to become a more effective teacher through that. I can't believe
that it's only 2 weeks left until the next transfer already as well. The
time has just gone by so fast here in Geelong, but we've been able to
accomplish so much. Throughout this week Elder Rua and I have been
trying so set up as many appointments with the active member families as
we can to share the family mission plan with them because we know that
we'll be able to get the ward more excited about missionary work through
that and hopefully find some really solid new investigators instead of
searching the regular way of just tracting. We've been able to set up
quite a few so far so we hope that it works well for us. Well thanks
once again for the wonderful e-mail this week and especially your love
and support which helps me get through this
time on the mission! I look forward to another great week ahead and
hope that you have a great week as well. I love you and I'll talk to you
again soon!
Love,
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