Things are REALLY starting to heat up down here.

I can't even begin to say how hot these past few days have been. Ah well, it's only going to get hotter, that's what I have to look forward to. This week it got up to about 38 degrees and we didn't have the car for most of the week. So we're out biking around (mind you we probably did about 20-30 kms/day on the bikes this week) and when we get back to the flat there is no air conditioning or anything to help cool us down, so we just have to sit there and sweat, and drink lots of water of course. Hopefully when we get to the middle of the summer I'll be able to have a car or an air conditioning or something. Because this is just hectic right now. I guess it does have one good advantage, I am getting a mean tan, on my arms and face that is haha, gotta love the missionary tan lines, especially the collar. It's pretty ridiculous. But I love it. Helps me get into shape as well.

This week as been way good as far as teaching goes. We got a new investigator this week named Tina and she lives with a less active guy named John. She had a lot of questions about the church and John wasn't able to answer them so they invited us over. Her questions were kinda not what we were expecting at first, they were mostly just about the Book of Mormon because she's been reading that, but we taught a really good lesson on the restoration and how we got the book and how she can find out if it is true. At the end of the lesson we watched the Restoration DVD and the spirit was really strong in the room. We asked her how she felt after the DVD and she said that she had a really good feeling. So then we invited her to pray about the Book of Mormon and if she gets that good feeling again after praying about it then she'll know that it is true. We're seeing them again this Tuesday so I'm pretty excited to see how she went with that. It's pretty sad that John couldn't answer her questions for her though. He served a mission about 10 years ago and he's just strayed way off the path ever since. So along with teaching and hopefully baptising Tina, we're hoping to get John active in the gospel again and help him to find or re-find his testimony. It's just so unfortunate when people go astray after serving a mission. It just shows you how powerful Satan can be. Because right now I feel more solid in my testimony than I ever have felt in my life and I'm sure that will be doubled in another year from now. I can never see myself falling away because of the strength and power of my testimony. I guess it also shows you how important it is to constantly be nourishing that testimony. I guess some people just come home from a mission and go right back into the life they left behind rather than living the things that they preached on their mission and keeping their study and prayer habits up. Study and prayer is so important, and some people just overlook that I guess. But I have faith that John will come back, he's already starting back on the path, we just have to help him the rest of the way until he reaches that Iron Rod and is continually holding fast to it.

This Wednesday we had another Specialised training meeting and we learned all about "how to begin teaching" in Preach My Gospel. There's 10 points in there that if we use them people will really see us as representatives of Jesus Christ and help them realise what we are there to do, to teach them and to eventually help them come to the waters of baptism. I think that's really something that we have to do with Tina next time we go over there as well. We didn't really establish that on our first visit, so next time we're going to do that and see if she is really wanting to make changes in her life or if she just wants to have her questions answered. But the meeting was really good. President Cahoon is the most inspired person ever for this mission. I realised that with the new schedule and way of doing things we only have 4 interviews with him a year. That's like hardly anything. But that's just planned interviews, we could really have one a month if we really wanted to, but that could start rumours. It's just way different, I didn't realise that it was that infrequent until just this week cause I was thinking it should be time for interviews again, but nope, not until January. Oh well.

Christmas coming up in less that a month!!!! That means phone calls! boo yah! I'm so pumped. Speaking of Christmas, my Australia Thanksgiving wasn't too bad. I think I ate more here than I've eaten any other Thanksgiving in my life. But I also think that's because of the black tag, people just love shoving food down your throat (not literally, of course). But we had a Cook Island Thanksgiving. All the Chop Suey and Rice you could ever dream of. I think when I get home I'm going to make up some Chop Suey and Rice everything Thanksgiving from now on, just in remembrance of this Thanksgiving. It was fantastic. The only bad part of it was the biking home afterward with about 5 extra kgs of food on me haha. I guess I've kinda become accustomed to that by now though. The only thing that was missing from my Thanksgiving was a game of football. It was saweet.

On Saturday we were going to do some Christmas caroling at the Rockingham Foreshore, but before we could even start singing a guy came up to us and wanted to talk so the 6 of us sat around and talked to him and we actually set a baptismal date with him. He lives in the Rockingham area, so I don't really know much more about him, if he came to church or anything like that. But it was still a pretty cool experience. We may try the "musical contacting" again this week, but we'll see what happens.

On Friday night we biked to the chapel (20 km round trip) for a "Kapa Haka" practice. It's the coolest thing ever. I can't really describe it, but if you YouTube it, you might get an idea of what we were learning. It's like Maori songs mixed with the Haka and dancing. It was so cool. If I could speak one other language fluently (other than Spanish) it would definitely be Maori. It's the best. LOVE their culture. I can't even imagine going to New Zealand to experience it. I bet it's like 20 times better over there. But there's enough Maoris her to experience it enough. Love it.

Well anyways, that's about it for this week. I love you all HEAPS! Hope you all have a great week!

much love,

Elder Tanner

Thankgiving this week??

I honestly cannot believe that Thanksgiving is coming up this week. Not only because it's my last Thanksgiving in the mission field, but this week has been blimmin hot! I think one day it got up to 38 degrees. But I'll tell that story in a bit.

This week has been pretty busy, kinda slow as well though. I know that kinda doesn't make sense, but I'll explain. I've been on two exchanges this week. One with Elder Metekingi in Rockingham and the other one with Elder Cummings in my area, and Elder Jorgensen got to go down to Halls Head for that one. Halls Head is THE farthest city area away from the actual city. But I digress. The exchange with Elder Metekingi was the best. He was able to teach me a lot about how to be a better leader and we had some really good conversations about things that he has observed in the past that works in leadership and stuff that doesn't work. He is totally going to become a district leader or even zone leader very soon. He's such a loving guy and he's so much better with people than I am. Not that I'm bad with people, but he's just heaps better. We had fun together though for that 24 hours. He promised me that we would get at least one feed since I hardly ever get feeds in Kwinana. We ended up getting 4 feeds in that 24 hours. I was so smashed by the end of that day. We were on bikes as well. I am getting a nice little tan though. Being out on the bikes in that 35-38 degree weather. Woo, it's so hot. It actually rained the past two days though. I even actually heard a thunder strike. That's probably about the 8th bolt of thunder I've heard my whole mission. So it's a bit cooler today, just a little muggy. I reckon it will probably get up to about 30 later though, so we'll see. On monday night we had a Family Home Evening at a family's house in their ward, The Peihopas. They have a son who leaves for his mission in March or something and he's going to Washington DC, I may have already told you about that though. They invited a couple of their investigators over for this FHE and it was the best one probably of my whole mission. Mostly because everybody there was Maori except for me, and I love the Maori people/culture. Brother and Sister Peihopa were teaching the investigators (Sharon and Leoni) about the temple and eternal families, while me and Elder Metekingi were eating dinner. It was great. And then we shared a lesson about service after that a played a pretty cool game about service as well. It's a fun game, I'll have to teach it to you someday, it's too hard to explain through an email. But yeah, great exchange that one was.

We got to go to the temple on Wednesday. I feel like since we don't get to go to the temple as often anymore I appreciate it more. It makes me feel for those people that have to drive hours and hours to go to the temple that can only go like once or twice a year. More blessings for those people, that's for sure. I was kinda bummed though because we didn't get to stick around afterwards. Soon as the session was over we had to leave pretty much right away to take our car to get serviced. It was fun getting to go get our car serviced though because I got to drive back to my first area. Although I didn't get to go visit the Mains or the Berrymans or the McGaugheys like I wanted to, it brought back a lot of good memories just driving through the area. We would've tried to visit one of those families if we had time, but we had to be at the Preedy's house at 6:30 and we didn't leave Ted Harris' house (the guy that does the car servicing) until about 6:05. And the drive from Marangaroo to Kwinana is about 50+ kilometres. We were booking it through that peak hour traffic though and made it to the Preedy's by 6:45. Pretty good timing I'd say. And when I say booking it I mean going the speed limit which is only 100 km/hr. It was good to see the Preeds again though. I think that was the first time we had been over since Elder Jack left, so it was good.

We went on splits with the bishopric on Thursday night. That was the first time on my whole mission that I've ever done that. It was exciting though. We went to go visit the Higgs and Bishop personally invited them to church. Although they didn't show up yesterday, they felt a bit more welcome than when just we invite them. We're going to keep inviting them every single week until they show up though. We NEED Sister Higgs to be active so she can fellowship Evelyn into the gospel. But it was just a really good experience going out with the Bishop like that. And even though we only had time to visit the one family, but next time we do that hopefully more people can come along so we can spend more time visiting other families as well.

The exchange with Elder Cummings went well also. Taught Evelyn a sweet lesson about Temples. We invited Arturo and her to the Summer Wonderland activity and they said they will come if we get them a ride up there. It will be so good for Evelyn to see the temple and feel of the spirit there. The spirit was so strong when we were talking about Eternal Families with them. I know that Evelyn wants to be with Arturo for eternity and vice versa.

So let me tell you about the story of it being 38 degrees. We decided to take our bikes out on the particular day even though we knew how hot it would be. We just brought heaps of water with us. We biked to a couple of peoples houses near by and nobody was home so we decided to bike it out to Bertram, about a 30 minute bike ride. We were just passing the Kwinana train station, about the farthest point we could be away from the house and still be on the bikes, and I got a flat tire. So luckily we were right there by the station because there's another train station just down the road from our house so we hopped on the train, went back home, fixed the flat, and then we were on our way. It was miserably hot though. Because before we hopped on the train, we decided to go see at least one of the families that lived up there, so we just walked. We were blessed enough to walk by some sprinklers that were going off in a park to cool us off a bit, but yeah. So we walked to this appointment, then walked back to the train station, and then rode the train, then walked home. Pretty hectic day if you ask me. The next day, I patched the hole, went riding again, and got ANOTHER flat on the same tube. So I just bought a new tube. It's all good now though. Gonna be back on the bikes this week for sure. Especially since we only have 200 kms left for the month in the car and that is not enough.

Anyways, love you all! Have a great Thanksgiving! Save some pumpkin pie for me!!

Much love,

Elder Tanner

G'day, Elder Tanner speaking...

Wowzers! What an amazingly long week. First let me explain the subject. I never imagined that being a district leader would involve making so many phone calls. It seems like every day the Zone Leaders are ringing me up and asking me to ask my district something then I have to call everybody and then call the zone leaders back. Or like missionaries in my district will just be randomly ringing me up asking questions. I don't know, it doesn't sound like much, but it definitely feels like a lot. I definitely use the phone heaps more than I used to that's for sure. I am loving it though, being a district leader though. This week we had a leadership meeting as well as a zone conference. That was my first leadership meeting to ever go to, but I liked it way more than zone conference I reckon. Mostly because everybody that was there I knew because they're all people that have been on their mission for just as long as me at least, whereas at zone conference there's always heaps of new missionaries that you don't really know. We learned about the same thing at both meetings so it was a bit tedious, but it was still fun. The thing that was cool about Leadership meeting was that I got to role play my district meeting for the Zone Leaders and they got to tell me what I did well or didn't do well. The only thing is that I had to teach the same thing that I taught at my last district meeting, which they were at, so it was basically just a re practice, they were just seeing if I had adjusted the things that I needed to make better. Such as making it last only 45 minutes and getting the district more involved. It was also sort of different because I got to teach it with the other district leader in our zone, Elder Blair. It was kinda just like we were teaching a normal lesson to them. I was actually really surprised at how well we were able to teach together since we had never really taught together before. I ran really smoothly. Even more smoothly than some lessons I've had after being with a companion for 10 weeks. I don't know why, it just clicked along really well.

Elder Jorgensen and I have still been on the bikes every single day. We're supposed to have the car Friday-Monday, but that just doesn't seem long enough. It seems like the time we need it most is when we don't have it, but I guess that's probably just all in my head, because there's no way that you're going to get me to bike 60 kms on Sunday. Especially with the heat coming up soon. Very soon. Can't wait for that!

We had a pretty cool experience this week with one of our neighbours. I don't know if I've ever talked about him but his name is Joe and we help him out whenever he needs it because he's always really nice to us. This week he asked us to come over and bless his house because he and his wife haven't been having good feelings in that house like they want to be having. He's lost a couple of jobs in the past couple of months and he was supposed to be finding out later that day if he was going to be getting this new job or if he was going to remain unemployed for the time being. Before we blessed the house he was telling us how he knows that we can help him with this because we've helped him with so many things in the past, but he wanted us to know where he stood with religion and he basically wasn't going to be changing anytime soon because he's too staunch a catholic. But anyways, we blessed the house, prayed that he would get the job and then didn't hear back from him for a couple of days. But when we did hear from him again he came over all excited and told us that he got the job and he knows that it was because of our prayers. It was such a good experience. And even though he's not going to change any time soon, we at least know that he has a good testimony of prayer, so that's something that we can totally work with down the road.

The reason that I'm emailing so late today is because this morning we went to this wildlife park and it was so cool. It's the closest I've ever been to Kangaroos, and Dingos, and Wallabys, and Camels, it was so much fun. We had a big bucket of food that we got to go around and feed all the animals with. My favourite was definitely getting to feed the Kangaroos. They're so awesome. I wish I could bring one home and have it as a pet. These ones at this park were just so lax, you could come right up to them and pet them and feed them. Wild ones won't let you get near that close. Oh and I got to pet a koala, which is also very soft awesome, but they would make boring pets, sleeping 20 hours a day "to conserve energy". I wonder what they're saving all that energy for.

I get to go on exchanges with my district starting this week. Starting tonight actually. I'm pretty excited. Especially for the one tonight. We're exchanging with rockingham and I get to be in Rockingham with Elder Metekingi. It's going to be so good. Our goal is to invite 20 people to church for the upcoming Sunday. We'll see how that goes. But I'm uber excited either way. Elder Metekingi and Elder Abel are the best. I wouldn't mind serving around those 2 Elders for my whole mission. I love those guys. Not only are they just good people to be around, but they help me out heaps with being a district leader. They're always giving me the encouragement and everything that I need and helping me to be the example to the district that I want to be. If I'm lucky maybe I'll even get to serve with one of them down the road.

Well I'm attaching some pictures from my morning. Hope you enjoy them!

I hope you all have a great week! Pray for a missionary experience! You WILL get them!

Much love,

Elder Tanner

Elder Jorgenson!

What a great week!

So as you all know, Elder Jack got transferred and my new companion wasn't going to be here until Thursday. So since Elder Jack left I got to go with Elder Blair who is the other district leader in the zone and work in his area with him on Wednesday night. It was really good because even though he has a car, we rode bikes for most of the night. It made me excited and made me want to ride bikes more, because I think Elder Jack and I only rode bikes 2 or 3 times the entire time we were together. Also on Thursday I was talking to Sister Cahoon and she said something that hit me as well. She said that more missionary work gets done when you're on bikes; and isn't that the truth. So on Thursday morning Elder Blair and I drove back to the mission office and waited to get our new companions (along with the other 2 missionaries that were training). My companion's name is Elder Jorgenson. He's from Seattle, Washington and he's been serving in the Alabama Montgomery Mission for 6 months. He said that the reason it took so long for him to get his visa was that when he got the FBI clearance in the mail, his dad didn't know what it was or what it was for and he just threw it away so he had to apply for it again and that alone can take 4 months. So he ended up serving a quarter of his mission in Alabama. I think that must be a huge culture shock, I mean, going from a mission where everybody is somewhat religious to a mission where over half the doors you knock on the people tell you that they don't even believe in God. But he's doing really well. I'm glad that the only thing that I have to train him in is the Aussie ways. I've been getting to teach him all the Aussie slang words they use, teaching him what to say and not say, even trying to help him with his accent as well. I can't believe how heavy his American accent is. It's weird to me. He told me that I have a bit of an Aussie accent as well. Which is understandable since his accent just sounded so American to me. Whenever we've talked to people this week they've been like "you're obviously American," but then turned to me and asked me where I'm from. haha, I guess I just don't notice that my accent has changed. It's been funny teaching him about all the different Aussie things and sayings. It's weird to think that I was in his same spot just a year ago. The one thing that I haven't taught him yet is how to drive on the left side of the road. He just says he's not ready for that yet, but it will come.

But like I was saying, when I was with Elder Blair, I got really motivated to get on the bikes more. So Elder Jorgenson and I have only used the car to get to Rockingham for church and morning exercise and stuff like that. But on Saturday we spent 7 hours on the bikes. We were only able to see 3 people, but it was really good to be able to get out there and talk to people that we passed by on the street. You can't really do that when you're in the car. So it's been a really good week in that sense. I'm definitely going to stick with it, even when it gets up to the high 30's next month, I'll just be drinking heaps and heaps of water, that's all. I'm sure I can do it though.

My first week as a district leader has been great as well. I was nervous to run my first district meeting on Friday, but it actually went really well. Everything ran smooth and it actually lasted as long as it was supposed to. It actually went a bit longer than it was supposed to. I gave them some training on the importance of getting investigators to come to church and how they can receive revelations and spiritual truths through church attendance. It was a lot easier to give training to the whole district than I thought it would be. Everybody was participating and all that, it was good. Afterwards, the zone leaders evaluated me and said it was really good for being my first time. I just have one or two things that I need to improve for my next time around, so we'll see how that goes in two weeks. We don't have a district meeting this week because of Zone Conference which is happening on Wednesday. Also tomorrow I get to go to a leadership training meeting in Dianella. I'm pretty excited for that. Lots of firsts for me this week and last week. There seems to be a lot of things that you can only learn as a district leader or zone leader. I've been learning a lot more from everything i do. My studying, meetings, correlating, everything. Correlating with everybody in my district was a different experience as well. It seems like everybody talks to me with more respect than they all have in the past, but I guess that just comes with the calling. I'm just going to have to work to keep that respect. And the best way to do that is just to lead by example, which so far isn't as hard as I thought it would be.

I'm so excited for the new experiences that I'm going to have this transfer. It is looking way promising. Angela got up in testimony meeting yesterday to bare her testimony and it was fantastic. I was worried she might say something that we didnt' teach her, but she bore a great testimony on the living God, the Book of Mormon, and the great work the missionaries are doing. It made me smile heaps. She's progressing very well in the gospel. She also working really hard to get her husband to come to Church with her. He has actually sat in with on on our past two lessons which is amazing.

Evelyn is doing really well right now too. Arturo says "she's ready to be baptised, she's just procrastinating". She says she wants to be baptised in the Philippines, or she wants to learn English better first. I think it will just be a matter of time. We're getting excited though, and I think Arturo is as well. Her English is so much better than it used to be. It's so good to see the spirit working in action on her. Even though she doesn't understand much of what we say, she is liking our messages more and more. It's great.

I think that's about it for this week! Have a superally fantastic week!

much love,

Elder Tanner