February 24, 2014

G'day!

 

As always, I loved the e-mail this week! So many exciting things happening, if you see Ryan again sometime soon tell him congratulations and I'm very excited for him because he will have so many great experiences. That's great that there are so many missionaries out at the moment in our ward and the other wards, there is always a need for more serving! Tell Alyssa happy 10th birthday for me! And thanks for the suggestion about BYU, I will remember that for this Sunday. Hard to believe there is only 2 weeks left in this transfer and after that there are only 2 transfers left on my mission. The time just melts away so fast the closer you get to the end, which is sad, but you just have to continue to work hard and make the most of it! Thanks heaps also for looking up the lineage for me, hopefully they are able to get the correct information without too much difficulty. So each week is a great week in Mooroolbark and the past one was no exception to that. We continue to see many blessings. We did have a few disappointing things this week though, one of them being church attendance. We had 8 people who were confirmed to come to church with members to pick them up but within the last 24 hours before church 6 of them cancelled for various reasons, so we were a bit sad about that especially since the talks were really great in Sacrament. It always seems to be the case that the very best Sacrament meetings for your investigators are the ones when nobody shows up haha. But we hope they will all be there next Sunday. The Pencostal teacher agreed to come check out our church next Sunday as well which will be very interesting to see what he thinks, especially since it's testimony meeting-a.k.a. the scariest sacrament meeting for missionaries hahaha. Ellen wasn't able to come to church either yesterday which means her baptismal date will have to be changed, which is unfortunate but hopefully it won't have to be pushed back very far. We were fasting on Sunday for all the investigators we currently have who are seriously reading and praying about the Book of Mormon at this present time that they can receive and recognize their answers to the truthfulness of it. So we hope this week we will be able to see some fruits from that fast. One really good thing that happened this past week was with the Sudanese family I mentioned last week. The daughter, Monica, was able to go to young women's on Tuesday and had a really great time! All the young women really made her feel welcome and a part of the group and Monica is excited to continue to be involved in the Young Women's program, so we look forward to continuing to see their family progress. Also on Tuesday we had a really great experience with the weekly splits with the ward. We were trying to contact some people on the ward list who we didn't know and most of them had moved house. However, we met one man named Adam who was at the correct address. He is an awesome guy! We talked with him for about 30 minutes and found out he's been less-active in the church for about 15 years but still remembers a lot about it. He said even though he wasn't attending church he was still praying and reading the scriptures. After talking he said he was happy for us to start visiting him on a fairly regular basis and that he felt sometime in the near future he would be ready to come back to church again. So that was a pretty good miracle for us this past week! Another cool thing this past weekend was that on Saturday it was the Chin (a state from Burma--Elder Suan and all the Burmese people we are teaching are from the Chin state) National Day. So all the Chin people from Australia came down to celebrate the anniversary of the national day, and it just happened to be a few minutes from where we live! So it was perfect timing for Elder Suan to be here. We got permission to go to the national day festival and were able to meet a lot of people, so it was a great opportunity. So everything is continuing to progress here which is good, and we are excited for the 40-Day Fast which starts tomorrow which we know will keep us very busy and bring heaps of miracles to the area and ward. Thanks for you support and love and e-mails! They always help a lot! I hope you have a great week this week and I'll talk to you again soon! Love you heaps!

 

Love,

 

Elder Hopkins