How to go from trainee to psuedo-trainer in 9 weeks.

I have now caught a glimpse of what it's like to train a new missionary.

So we got a call from the AP's last monday night and they told us that there was a new missionary coming into the mission Tuesday morning at 7:45 and that he would be staying with us. He only stayed with us for two days but it was a great two days. His name is Elder Ulas and he's from Vanuatu, which is in the Pacific islands, close to Fiji. His english isn't that spectacular so we pretty much spent the two days with him teaching him english and things about Australia. His country is pretty much a third world country. He's never used a computer, never used a debit card, never been to a restaurant, and the list goes on. So we've been teaching him pretty much how things work and we spent a lot of time teaching him things like the first lesson, his testimony, and how to pray in english, and he's already coming along really well. But anyways, he was with us til Thursday which was Zone Conference and his new companion flew down from Karratha (it's like a 90 minute flight from here) and now they are staying in the Marangaroo flat covering that area. Which is sweet in some ways but not others. It's sweet because Glover and I no longer have to cover Girrawheen and Marangaroo, just Girrawheen. But it's not sweet because our old district got split up 2 weeks before transfers and we had an amazing district. But hopefully this district will be equally as awesome. We'll see.

We're really going to have an awesome last two weeks together I think. This week and last week was just awesome. We may not get anybody baptised, but we're definitely going to get close. I've learned over the past two weeks how important it is to have faith in every aspect of missionary work. You even have to have faith to just stick to your plans each day. In my planner this week on the to-do list everyday I wrote "have faith to stick to plans" and just from that I saw a difference in our work ethic and just everything we did overall, even down to having faith that a certain person was going to be home when we knocked on their door, usually they were. It was fantastic.

Zone Conference this week was really good. Our mission president is such a smart guy. He gave us a list of ways we can increase our faith and one thing that he pointed out was the difference between increasing your faith and strengthening your faith. And he said that we need to learn to WAIT on the Lord to know that he will answer. Those two things just really stuck out to me. It was so cool that he talked about faith too since that's what I've been studying and working on for these past couple of weeks.

Not much else has happened this week. Getting to spend two days helping train Elder Ulas has pretty much been the highlight of the week. Lots of learning experiences. I decided I'm not ready to leave this area yet. I gotta see at least one person that I've found get baptized. But we'll see.

Love you all!

Elder Tanner