May 13, 2013

G'Day!

First of all, Happy Mother's Day! Hope your Mother's Day has been a fantastic one and that everything went well! This past week was another rough week on the missionary work side. Things just don't seem to be going our way at the moment. We were able to teach more lessons this week than last week, however, which was of course great! We have a couple new promising investigators as well which hopefully will start progressing towards baptism as we begin to teach them more. We weren't able to see Joel and Camilla this past week as we had hoped because something came up and they had to move the lesson time, however they're both still going really well! As I mentioned in the last e-mail, we had to spend a lot of time doing work on the flat again. They had someone come to replace one of the windows that had been broken for about a year, and then someone came to clean all the carpets as well, so we had to move everything out of the house for that. They also cleaned the carpets for the other Geelong flat so we help those Elders move stuff outside as well. We also had missionary splits this past Thursday night with the Elders Quorum again and it went pretty well. The member I went with and I were able to see some good success from it as we were able to update some information for addresses on the ward list and also met 2 members from the list that said that we can come back to visit them again, which is always exciting to have that happen! Church was quite good as well and there were heaps of people there this Sunday as it was Mother's day. Elder Pain from the other Geelong area gave one of the talks, it was just a short 5 minute one on the influence of Mothers and he did pretty good for the first Sacrament talk of his mission. They are going to give all the Geelong missionaries an opportunity to get up and speak in the coming weeks which will be good to give the ward more of an opportunity to see us and get to know us. Since we haven't been having too much success as of late in some areas, we've tried working more in other areas such as working with the members. That's proved to be helpful as the members are gaining a greater desire to do missionary work and there are several potential referrals that members have mentioned that will hopefully go really well. It's very cool to see each week in the Priesthood opening exercises that more and more members are sharing missionary experiences they've had in the past week or so. So that has been one bright spot for the past 2 weeks! And while this week was a bit bland and uneventful, this coming week looks to be a very exciting and eventful one. We have a lot of great meetings lined up, with our Zone Conference on Thursday which is always good, a Mission President's Fireside this next Sunday evening which will be great seeing as it will be the first one that I'll have been to since I moved from Pakenham, and on Wednesday they're having a mission wide meeting for all of the islander missionaries (Samoan, Tongan, New Zealand, etc.) and since Elder Taufa is Tongan I'll be going with him to the meeting so that should be interesting! They did a meeting like that last year apparently so it must be a tradition now in the mission. And of course the most anticipated events of all missionaries each transfer is this Saturday, which is transfer news! So that will also be exciting to get that as it always is, so look forward to that in the next e-mail. Turns out in this next intake of new missionaries that there are only 40 instead of the 60 that was said before, which obviously is still a huge amount! I think some of them just had some visa problems so they'll come in at a later transfer. Well unfortunately the past 2 weeks I haven't had too much exciting to mention and write about, but it's just been a slow 2 weeks. I know next week I'll have heaps to write about because so much will be happening so hopefully that will make up for the lack of info these past 2 e-mails. Well thanks as always for all of your wonderful love, support, and prayers! I hope that this week is a fantastic one for you and you continue to see many, many blessings and miracles! I love you heaps and I'll talk to you again soon!

Love,

Elder Hopkins