March 3, 2014

G'day!

 

Thanks for the e-mail this week! Just in response to some things from your e-mail, Sister Burton is better now and they are back to working in the area, which is great, so thanks for your prayers on their behalf. And that's great that you've made some progress on the line of authority, that will definitely be cool to look at when it's ready. And a big thanks to everyone else who sent an e-mail this week! I loved hearing from you all and greatly appreciate your love and support! This past week was really good for us. Our strengths have always been being able to be busy with a lot of teaching appointments and new investigators, but our weakness has been having people commit or accept a day to prepare for baptism. All of them have a sincere desire to find truth and also find out if the church is true, the only problem is that they can't read the Book of Mormon. There are several of the Burmese investigators we have who are capable of reading it and understanding most of what they read, but the majority of them can't read English, which obviously makes it difficult in a quest to find if it's true. However, the ones who do understand English say they feel good and feel the Spirit as they read it, so we hope they will be able to act on those feelings and promptings. But I know that the Spirit can cross all barriers, including language barriers, since Mary was baptized and has been active ever since even though her English wasn't too great. So we hope that we will be able to see some miracles soon with some of our investigators. The Sudanese family we're teaching is going really well though. They were able to come to church for all 3 hours this Sunday and really enjoyed it! They've been fellowshipped by the members very well and they'll be at church again next Sunday. We hope to talk more about baptism with them this coming week. We also had Zone Conference this past week which was great as always. We had visiting and speaking to us Elder and Sister Taylor who are the Pacific Area Mental Health advisors. They talked about how to have good relationships with our companions and other things relating towards maintaining good physical and mental health during our missions, which are things that they don't often cover or talk about. Since the age change and there being younger missionaries in the field, there apparently have been a lot of problems with emotional and mental stress in the missionaries, so Elder and Sister Taylor have been going and speaking to the 18 missions they cover in the area. Also this past week the 40 day fast has started and it has gone average so far. We had 3 of the 6 families signed up first actually fast, so 50% success rate isn't exactly desired, so we hope that the rest of the members make a more concerted effort throughout this week. Well unfortunately the computers this week don't have as much time as usual because they're reserved for some other activity so I will have to make this shorter than normal. But everything is going well and we are loving the work! Hard to believe it's already the last week of the transfer, so we will continue to work hard this week and find out Saturday night if there are any changes. Thanks for all you do and I hope you have a great week this week as well! I love you heaps and I'll talk to you next week!

 

Love,

 

Elder Hopkins