G'Day!
Thanks
so much for the great e-mail this week! Glad everything has
been going well. This past week was another pretty good one. As guess
to start off this week continuing from last week's dramas, the bikes
didn't cause as much trouble. However, this week early on I passed my
curse over to Elder Gabignaud who had both of his tires go flat which
was unfortunate, but we got those fixed without a problem and we haven't
had any problems since then so hopefully that's the last we have to
deal with flats for at least the rest of this transfer. We met quite a
few new people this week again to go back and teach so hopefully that
will prove fruitful for us. We've been doing really well thus far in
Wangaratta for finding enough people to teach, this issue however, as it
can often be, is just getting these people to progress and exercise
real intent. We know that as we continue to work hard though that the
blessings and miracles regarding that will come to pass. It does make it
somewhat more difficult seeing as so far it's been a
lot of tracting and just talking to people on the street, but we've
started the push for more member involvement which we know will help a
great deal in the coming weeks. We're also having our first branch
sporting/games activity this Saturday morning and hopefully a fair
amount of people come to that, members and nonmembers. It worked pretty
well when we did the same thing in Geelong so I know we can see success
from it here as well. This past week we had the opportunity to do a lot
of service as well which was great! We were able to help out some of our
investigators with their lawns and gardens, and we also had a pretty
cool service on Friday helping out one of the member families herd some
cattle! That was pretty cool to do since I'd never herded cattle before,
and there was probably about 7 we helped guide along the path, so not
too many to handle. Also on Friday we had exchanges with the Zone
Leaders Elder Ogles and Elder Hasson which went well.
They made a new format for exchanges now so it was a little different
this time than usual. We only got to exchange with them for 4 hours
instead of the whole day, and in those 4 hours we had to plan all the
activities along the lines of the new format (for example: 40-60 minutes
for a lesson with an active member, 20 minutes of tracting, 20 minutes
for travel time, etc.). But it turned out to be a good exchange
nonetheless and we were able to see some great success from the things
we did there. I was with Elder Ogles for the exchange which was great
since I hadn't been on exchanges with him yet in the field. One cool
miracle that we saw this past week was while we were having dinner with a
recent convert family named the Hills, they had a non-member who was
there as well. His name was Jack and he was a friend of the father of
the family. We were talking with him and found out he had a lot of stuff
on his plate that were stressing him out, one of which
was a major surgery that he had to go into tomorrow. So eventually the
conversation started about the priesthood and priesthood blessings and
he'd heard just a tiny bit about them before but didn't know much. But
when we were telling him about how blessings work he was really
interested and he asked us if we could give him a blessing! So that was
great and he was able to feel the spirit when we gave him the blessing
and was really grateful for us doing that. So we'll see hopefully the
fruits that come from that this week. And then another cool experience
that had to do with enduring to the end happened on Saturday when our
few appointments that we did have fell through and we just had to go out
tracting for a while. Unfortunately everyone that was actually home
(because a lot of people weren't home) was not interested at all and
would barely give us the time of day. However, we kept going and just
went around trying different areas until we got to the
last street we would tract for the day (this is 5 hours later from when
we started, still with no one that offered to let us come back). As we
went through the first bit of the street it was the same as it had been
so far, however, in the last part of the street we were blessed to have 4
new people to go back and see. So even though it was frustrating that
no one was interested in talking to us, we kept going and finally
received the blessings. So we'll be seeing those people this week, along
with the others that we met thoughout the week. Church this week was
really good and there was a pretty good attendance as well. There were 2
less-active members that came this week which was great and they both
really enjoyed it. There also was a semi-active family that finally came
as well after several weeks of not being here. So the work is slowly
but surely progressing here in Wangaratta and we know we'll continue to
see a lot of growth and miracles as we
continue to work hard. Well unfortunately I'm out of time but I'm
grateful for all of your love and support and I hope that you have a
great week ahead this week! I love you heaps and I'll talk to you again
soon!
Love,
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