May 6, 2013

G'Day!

Thanks heaps for the great e-mail as always! I really enjoyed reading it and I am also really looking forward to skyping with you next week as well! This past week was quite the opposite of last week as it was a pretty slow week and we didn't see as much success as we would've liked to. We were able to see many of our investigators and were able to still teach some good lessons but our finding of new people to teach this week didn't prove very fruitful. But obviously every week can't turn out the way we would hope it too and these weeks happen every so often, so we'll just continue to work hard and we know this week will bring more blessings and miracles. Joel is still going really well, however, we didn't get to see them this past week because he started a new shift at work which messed their schedule up a bit for a few days so they weren't able to have us round, but we see them this Wednesday (and they were at church and loved it as always!). One highlight of the week is that we've been able to get some more activities started up in the ward that will hopefully help the missionary efforts and fellowshipping to increase. We've organized a weekly sports day for the Elders Quorum and anyone else who wants to come where they can bring their friends or any less-active members to a low-key environment where they can just have fun but also interact with the members and have some involvement with the church, so hopefully that will turn out well. We're also going to start a monthly 'cottage meeting' as they call it, which is just like a mini fireside at a member's home where we bring investigators or less-active members to where we have a lesson and maybe a musical number or a video and then of course food as well (that's where we catch them! haha just kidding), but it's worked really well in the past so hopefully Geelong will see success from that as well. If you have any other ideas of activities or events that we could do that might be good to try that could help give members opportunities to help and fellowship like those, that would help a lot! Another few ideas that we're working on are: Doing a missionary presentation in a combined relief society and elders quorum meeting to help members get to know the missionaries in the ward and also help them with their own missionary work, a cultural presentation (which would be just an event where the different cultures of people would put on a performance or a show), and of course more splits with the missionaries! But that's something we were able to make progress with this week and we know that will help increase the member work for the ward, and as they talked about in General Conference the members are the most important part of missionary work! One cool experience we did have this past week though, was that we went to see one of our newer investigators named Kurt just last night and his roommate was home as well. His roommate answered the door and he just happened to be someone that Elder Rua and I had talked to about 3 months earlier. However, when we got his phone number then we had written it down wrong and thus weren't able to keep contact with him. So that was really cool that we were able to find him again that way! We'll be teaching them both tomorrow night so hopefully it will go really well! And this week we also have our favorite thing to do in Geelong again, more cleaning of the flat! We feel like part-time service missionaries with the amount of work we've had to put into this flat. Hopefully this week will be the last time that we have to focus a lot of our time in cleaning the flat. It's definitely difficult to want to clean for hours and hours when you weren't the ones responsible for the way it is but at least we'll be helping it to look nice for whoever is in the flat in the future. I certainly have learned how to clean more from this experience so maybe I can take that as a positive side to it, haha. So thanks again for the wonderful e-mail this past week and for all of your love and support that help us so much in the work each day! I'm very grateful for all that you do for me! I hope that you have a wonderful week ahead and continue to see a lot of blessings and miracles as well. Continue to look for your own opportunities for missionary work or in helping out the missionaries there if you can. I know from experience now how much the help and love of the members really carries the work in that specific area. Well I love you very much and I look forward to talking with you next week!

Love,

Elder Hopkins