March 4, 2013

G'Day!

The e-mail was really great this week, I loved reading it! This past week was pretty good, certainly busy at the beginning. You'll find it funny and cool at the same time that Elder Rua's new area is actually in Pakenham! So him and I just did a swap of areas, haha. He'll be there in a 4-missionary flat so that should be fun. I got to talk to Elder Hirata a bit at the meeting as well and it sounds like Pakenham is still doing well! Afa and Lisa and also the Sekene family have been able to go to the temple which was really great! Cruiz and Chelsea have kind of slipped back into a bit of a lazy state again with coming to church, so hopefully the new missionaries will help them get back into it since they were doing so well before! Joan Willmott also pushed her date back again unfortunately, so it's nice to see she's still herself, haha. I think it will be good to have so many missionaries there now so maybe one of them will be able to reach her heart more to help her feel the need to take more action. David and Melissa have also been coming to church more regularly again which is awesome! The ward is great as always as well, and Elder Hirata said that it's grown so much that Bishop Smith said he's going to have to split the ward! That's exciting for the area. So I enjoyed being able to hear about how the area was doing. So anyway, my new companion is Elder Matuu from Apia, Samoa. His english is really good as many Samoans are so it'll be the first time in a long time where I don't have any language study in the morning! He's been out for 6 months on his mission and this is his 2nd area. He's a pretty good missionary so hopefully he'll help Geelong grow as an area this transfer. He has a bit of a reputation for not being too obedient to the mission rules, however, so it may be a bit of a struggle to work hard this transfer. However, it made me extra motivated to be exactly obedient and work extra hard myself to hopefully help him see the blessings of it as well, so it's been good for me as well to increase my level of effort as well. Because of that, this first week we worked so hard we were completely dead by last night at the end of the week, but it certainly wasn't without many, many blessings! This week we were able to set a baptismal date with Noah for the 16th of this month so we're looking forward to that! Since he's just 11 and like to joke heaps, it's sometimes hard to keep him focused in the lessons but his comprehension is really good for his age and we've been able to help him understand everything he needs to so far. It also is good to know that he has some active family members who'll help him to remain active as well. His mom though is posing a bit of a stumbling block because he stays with her every other weekend and she doesn't let him go to church then so Luke (the mom's son as well) is going to try to talk to her about it this week. It's a very complicated situation with her and we don't know too much about it so it's very nice to have Luke as the fellowship. This week we also were able to find a former investigating family all the way back from 2006! It's a Sudanese family, and the dad, Joseph, is the leader of the Nuer community (an African nationality) for Geelong, so he has a lot of people who look up to him as a leader. So we have been praying that he'll be very receptive again to the Gospel because we know that so many blessings would come from him accepting the Gospel into his and his family's life. We are going to go visit them for the first time tonight so we're excited to begin teaching them again. We also tried contacting a lot of the less-active and inactive members in the ward this week, and while most of them were not receptive and sometimes a bit hostile, we did find one man from New Zealand who said that we can come back to see him this week, so hopefully we'll be able to see some blessings come from him. This past Sunday was excellent because we had 4 non-members/investigators from our area come to church. Lorraine (one of the one's influenced by anti-mormon literature) came to church again and had a really good time so hopefully she's gotten over that incident! I think it helped that we'd been having a Zone fast this Sunday for some of our area's concerns and included in that was 'overcoming anti-mormon material.' We also had a new person come to church for the first time that one of the members brought with her to church. Her name is Susan and she just moved to Geelong recently and when she was there she asked for some reading materials so we gave her a Book of Mormon and a pamphlet on the Restoration and she said she'll read them this week! Talking with the member friend after church, she said that Susan really loved church and had such a wonderful experience and felt so welcomed that she can't wait to come back next week! So as we've really worked hard we've been seeing many miracles come about such as her. Also, helping Candice and Walle Wang come back to church has been a blessing in more ways than one. Walle had to leave for China this past week to take care of his sick Grandpa but Candice is still here and this Sunday she brought with her: her mother (who's staying with her for a little while) as well as Chinese colleague she just met! So she's doing some excellent missionary work as well and both of those she brought will be coming back next week! Elder Hasson (the other missionary that stayed in Geelong) has a brand new missionary named Elder Pain from Brisbane, Australia, and they worked really hard this week as well, so we should see a lot of success and growth in the area over the next couple of weeks. So the mission's goal at the moment is to get about 85 baptisms in the month of March (which was the combination of two goals, one set by Elder Pearson of the 70, and the other set by the mission) which would be the highest the mission has ever had. So the mission as a whole has been excited and working extra hard lately so that we can achieve that goal, and for lack of a better phrase 'make history' for the mission, haha. At the moment the mission has 200 baptismal dates set, which is pretty incredible for the Melbourne mission, so we know we'll be able to reach our goal if we keep up the effort! I continue to develop a greater and greater love for the work each day and I know the Lord will continue to bless us for our hard work and effort. I'm continually grateful for all your love and support and I hope that you have a wonderful week ahead! Thanks again for the wonderful e-mail and I'll talk to you again soon! I love you!

Love,

Elder Hopkins