May 12, 2014

G'day!

 

Thanks for the e-mail as always! It was great being able to Skype with you yesterday! And happy official Mother's Day for you today! I'm very lucky to have such a wonderful mother. So this week was good and as always we were able to see many blessings. One of the greatest came on Wednesday. So as a Zone we've been doing zone prayers, which is where the whole zone prays for a specific companionship over a period of a couple of days until they have a stand-out miracle. And we were blessed to be the ones being prayed for at the beginning of the week. So they started praying for us on Monday night and on Tuesday it was just a pretty normal day, nothing too out of the ordinary. On Wednesday we saw some pretty cool blessings, one of them being that we met and began teaching someone from Myanmar (Burma) who Elder Suan had actually met once before because she had attended the church there. Her sister is also a member of the church, so that was a miracle for us! So we thought that was the miracle we were going to experience from the prayers, however, as the day turned into night we went over to a family we've been seeing for quite a while, the Viliamu family. I've probably mentioned them before in past e-mails (the dad is a less-active member from Samoa and his wife is Australian and they have 2 kids 18 and 15). So we've taught them over a period of probably 7 months (but we had 2 months where we stopped seeing them because nothing was progressing) and every time we are there the mom always talks for ages (she's a part of another faith) and doesn't really let us teach anything. The reason we keep going though is because the daughter and her boyfriend (20) are very interested in what we share and they really like reading the pamphlets and things. And so we've been wanting an opportunity to just be able to focus on them without any distractions. When we went there on Wednesday and had just sat down the mom told us that her friend's car just broke down and that she had to leave to go help her fix it, and thus for the first time we finally had the opportunity to teach the daughter and her boyfriend an actual lesson. We had a great lesson on the Restoration and the spirit was strong and the boyfriend even said the closing prayer! They accepted the invitation to read the Book of Mormon and expressed a desire to come to church. And just to add onto that miracle literally as soon as the lesson finished the mom walked back in the door. So Heavenly Father prepared the perfect amount of time for us to teach them! Our part member families are still progressing well. This past week as we had a lesson with one family, the non-member fiancé expressed that she wanted to be baptized! So that was awesome to hear, so now all they have to do is get married, which they're already preparing for, and then she can enter into that special covenant. The other family is progressing well too and the non-member fiancé in that family as well has made significant strides. She's been reading the Book of Mormon every day and said that the past Sunday was the first time she'd really felt lifted and inspired more than she has ever before. So it's great to see that she's had experiences with the Spirit. Everything else is going quite well, I just hope we can continue to maintain a high level of miracles and success during the last 3 and 1/2 weeks of my mission so I will always remember being able to finish strong. Thanks for all of your love and support! I hope that you have a wonderful week and I love you heaps! Talk to you again soon!

 

Love,

 

Elder Hopkins