November 18, 2013

G'Day!

 

Hope you have had a wonderful week this week! This past week was definitely one of the most miraculous weeks of the mission! There is so much that I could talk about so I hope I will have time to get all of the miracles down. So I guess first of all, the highlight of the week was that our investigator Mary (Myat Khin in Burmese) was baptized and confirmed on Saturday! It was a wonderful service and a blessing to be a part of it. She was baptized and confirmed on the same day because since she is still learning English and is about 69 she gets nervous when she's in front of a lot of people so Bishop gave the 'OK' for her to be confirmed at the service as well. I had the opportunity to do one of the talks before she was baptized (on baptism) and then I also participated in her confirmation. Elder Wood was the one who baptized her since he was the first missionary to find her and it was also his first baptism of the mission, so that was special for him! Elder Afele performed the confirmation. It all went great and the Spirit was strong there, and there was good support from the members that did attend. Mary was then sustained before the ward as a member yesterday at church. She was very happy and relieved after the baptism because in the days leading up to the baptism she had several trials going on. Not physical trials, but more of mental trials as in Satan trying to get at her mind and convince her it is not right and so on. Ever since Stake Conference last week she had been extra worried about the baptism and eventually her mind became so overwhelmed that she decided she wouldn't be coming back to church and left to go see her old pastor in Wantirna (the city that the Temple is in). So she went back there and stayed with the pastor and his family, but when she slept there the night before her baptismal interview she had like a vision in her dream that caused her to realize she needed to come back, which she did! We couldn't quite understand all of what she described the dream to be because she had trouble putting it into English, but it had something to do with seeing unclean people that had leprosy or some type of skin disease (maybe the same dream Peter had in the Bible! haha) but nevertheless Heavenly Father was able to guide her back to the Gospel so she could be baptized! So that was just one of the many miracles this week, onto some of the others. So we have some investigators Simone and Jack (who I may have mentioned before I'm not sure, they are a single mom and her 12 year old son) who we've been teaching for just a few weeks. Simone had contact like 12 years ago with the church and her family all joined the church but she didn't. Now her family has all left the church but she has a huge desire to follow Jesus Christ in her life now and do what's right so she excepted the invitation to see the missionaries again when Elder Wood and Elder Afele tracted into her just before I got here. She's Australian and has had a basic Christian background. Since we've been teaching her, her main concern has just been being able to accept the Book of Mormon as the additional word of God. We'd had some good discussions with her but about 2 weeks ago when we came to our lesson she was quite distraught. We soon found out that she had stumbled upon some anti-Mormon material on the internet as she was looking for information on the church (which I think I told you about before). We were thankfully, with the guidance of the Spirit, able to answer a lot of the concerns that had been brought up by this material and just testified of the importance of reading and praying about the Book of Mormon to receive her answer if the church is true. She then told us how she had been praying (but not reading yet, unfortunately) to know if the church is true but asked God specifically to put a purple flower in her garden as a sign to show her it's the right path. She had never had a purple flower before nor planted anything like it so she felt it would be an unmistakeable sign of truth. We were kind of hesitant and uneasy about that and told her that God usually doesn't work by odd signs like that but mostly through the feelings the Holy Ghost gives us. She said ok and promised that she would try praying for those feelings more diligently as she read (it'd been a few days already since she asked for a purple flower with no signs of one). So a few lessons went by and we thought we were teaching them pretty well but she still didn't seem to be receiving her answer to the truth of the things we'd taught. We weren't sure what would help her but we prepared a pretty good lesson for her on Thursday on how to receive an answer from the Holy Ghost and recognize it and also the purpose and role of the Book of Mormon. We went there with our fellowship and sat down with them and began our lesson. We started talking about the Book of Mormon and she asked if there were any evidences of it either in discoveries in the world or in the Bible. Elder Afele showed her the 'other sheep I have, which are not of this fold' comparison between John 10:16 in the Bible and 3 Nephi in the Book of Mormon. Simone read the 3 Nephi verses twice over and had a very concerned/questioned look on her face. Then all of a sudden asked her son to come with her out in the backyard so she could talk with him in private. We didn't know what to think but we were worried she was going to come back in and ask us to leave or something. However, she came back in and they were both looking quite shocked and happy. Simone then told us how when she went outside that morning she found in her garden a tall purple flower! We then went outside to see it as well, and sure enough there was a single purple flower beginning to bloom. It was such a miracle! Elder Afele, Elder Wood and I were all kind of stunned seeing as we didn't expect such an answer to come, but we were certainly humbled and our faith was strengthened in the power Heavenly Father has to answer any prayer that we need answered. They were at church yesterday and we see them again tonight and will talk about baptism, because she said as soon as she knows what's true she will be baptized. So that was a big obvious miracle for us! Another miracle was one of the members in the ward, Harmony Byrne (who just recently came back out of inactivity), gave her friend a Book of Mormon on Wednesday who has really been struggling as of late and who she felt was ready to receive the Gospel. Her friend accepted the Book of Mormon and also an invitation to meet with the missionaries, so Harmony called us after her meeting with him and arranged for us to go see him the next night (Thursday). Her friend is named Tenzen and is and 18 year old Australian. At the moment he has just been staying at the Maroondah hospital mental health clinic, not because he has any mental deficiencies but because he had a bit of a mishap with some security guards and they wanted to keep him there a few days to make sure he's sane (he gets out tomorrow). Tenzen is a very spiritual person and is so sensitive to the Spirit's promptings. We shared mainly about how God is our loving Heavenly Father, about the role of Jesus Christ in God's plan and the importance of following Him, and also a little bit about the Book of Mormon. Tenzen said he felt so good throughout the lesson and when we shared with him Galations 5:22-23 (the different feelings the Holy Ghost gives us) he said how he felt an overload of all those feelings. He then accepted an invitation to be baptized. He's been very prepared in many ways, and even before our lesson with him he had decided that he would read the Book of Mormon every night until he finished it. We've taught him one other time since then and we are very excited to see him progress! We've seen so many other miracles this week and have several others progressing towards baptism as well, so the Lord is pouring out blessings upon us! It's been really good being in a tripanionship at the moment because we're all determined to be hard working and exactly obedient which we know is what has brought so many blessings. So anyway, I've run out of time! I didn't get to say all I wanted to but hopefully I've given you enough reading material already, haha. I love you heaps and miss you! Have a wonderful week this week! Talk to you again soon!

 

Love,

 

Elder Hopkins

 

Elder Afele, Elder Wood, new member Mary (Myat Khin), and Elder Brandon Hopkins