Springtime = Service, Service, and MORE Service

What a busy week. It seems like all this week we've been helping people with service that they needed done more than we've actually been teaching. Lots of people doing stuff like spring cleaning, spring lawn mowing and other yard work, still getting junk out to the verge for bulk rubbish collection, we even helped our neighbour Joe paint a room yesterday. He said he would pay us back by mowing our lawn for us today while we were out. He's a really nice guy, a good guy to have as a neighbour. Even though he's not interested in coming to church with us or anything he helps us out a ton.

The teaching that we did do this week went really well. We taught Arturo and Evelyn on Sunday and we had one of the best lessons ever with them. We taught the Plan of Salvation and used the little Plan of Salvation puzzle that grandma sent me a while back. It was good to have a visual display while we were teaching to help Evelyn understand a bit more. The way cool thing about this lesson was that after we would teach a bit, Arturo would translate everything that we had taught for his wife. He was basically doing the teaching. It was really cool because you could pick out bits and pieces of what he was saying and he would say some things that were important that Elder Jack and I just hadn't mentioned yet or we had forgotten to mention. He was such an excellent teacher. He would use hand motions while we taught (for example touch his body when talking about how our body would be perfect after the resurrection) and then I would try to use those same hand motions when I started teaching again and I could see the understanding in Evelyn's eyes. We found out that there is a member who is a recent return missionary in the other ward that meets at our building who served in the Philippines and speaks Tagalog. The other Elders say that he would love to come teaching with us. So hopefully when we go to their house again on Saturday he can come along and find out how her understanding is going and maybe hopefully extend the baptismal commitment to her if he feels that she is ready.

Still working out things with Angela. Still haven't set an exact baptismal date yet, but she's still keen as. She still hasn't been able to stay for 3 hours at church but she did come to Sacrament meeting this week with her sister. We're seeing her tonight and we're not going to let her go on tangents like she does. We have to focus on setting that date. I also don't think she realises the importance of setting a date. So we kinda have to drill that into her head I think. I'm not 100% sure how we're going to do that, but we're going to do our best.

This past weekend has been one of the best. We had a ward activity on Saturday night and on Monday. Saturday was a pot luck dinner with a couple of performances by the youth and they had an ironing competition (which I won.) The dinner was alright, but I think the activity as a whole wasn't planned as well as it could have been. Mainly because it was supposed to start at 6 and people didn't start showing up until 6:15. We finally started at 6:45 and by then the food was cold, we didn't have as much time for all the games and stuff that were planned. But it was still fun overall. Angela wasn't able to come though, and neither was Arturo and Evelyn. The activity yesterday was much better I thought. There were lots more people. We met at a park close to the beach and played some softball, rugby, and I even got them to play a game of gridiron with me! Note to self though: never try to play a game of gridiron with a bunch of rugby players. I was the only American so it was tough. I was playing QB, Strong Safety, Referee/Umpire haha it was good fun though. Then we had a sausage sizzle and got to just have a nice chat with everybody. I got a nice little sunburn too. Arturo and Evelyn did come to this activity so that was way good. Arturo even played softball with us.

Not much else of real major importance happened this week. We did have a really good Ward Council meeting on Sunday. Bishop Chessel is so on to it. He was talking about the 4 types of people in Lehi's dream (there's the tree of life again), and how those 4 types of people are still in the world today. He talked about how we need to get our members from "clinging" to the iron rod to "continually holding fast" to the iron rod. Man, I just love Lehi's dream. This is one of the first ward council meetings I've been to (it's only my 3rd or 4th) that we actually got something accomplished at as well. So that was way good.

Sorry I don't have too much to say this week. Hope you have a fantastic week. I'll do my best to do the same!

Love you!

Elder Tanner

We Are Not the Ordinary...

.... Fearlessly extraordinary, working right just harry carry, in our humble way!

What a great week! So many good things happened this week. Well, I don't wanna over exaggerate, but lots of good things happened this week. We're so close to setting a baptismal date with Angela. We taught her on Tuesday and committed her to be baptised. She told us she would, she just has to talk to a few people and figure out which day is best. So we're trying to keep in real close contact with her until that happens because we know that now that she's told us that she'll be baptised, the adversary is going to start working really hard on her. So that was on Tuesday and we also saw her on Saturday, and she and her husband cooked up a barbecue for us. We almost had to call the fire department though, it was crazy. But we also got to help them with some service which was nice. "Big Trash" week is coming up and they only have it twice a year so we've been helping a lot of people clean up and get some stuff out to the verge. We're helping at least 2 or 3 people with that this week as well. Mostly less actives and investigators too which is way good.

We had a lesson with Arturo's wife who I'm pretty sure I told you all about last week. We found out her name is Evelyn. She's slowly but surely warming up to us as well. The lesson was pretty tough because Arturo has been a member for 30 years but we basically have to teach him and hope he will tell his wife what we are saying. We wanted to watch the restoration DVD in Tagalog with them, but the DVD remote didn't have batteries so we couldn't change the language. But our next appointment with them is on Friday and we are going to be bringing batteries so we can watch it this time and we're also going to be bringing all the pamphlets in Tagalog as well. So hopefully she'll have a read of those and ask her husband some questions while we're not there. She doesn't really ask him anything while we're there. But we know that he wants her to get baptised, we just don't know if she wants to get baptised, and it will be hard to tell. I think I'm going to learn to listen to the spirit really well while teaching her. I mean, I've taught people that don't speak much English before, but this is different. Mostly because she doesn't speak ANY English and we know that Arturo wants her to get baptised but we want to make sure we do it right, and that she understands what she's doing. We did leave a Tagalog Book of Mormon and committed both of them to read 2 Nephi 31. So hopefully they do that as well. We'll just have to pray extra hard for them.

The temple this week was really good. There were lots of people there, well actually, mostly just missionaries. But you could tell that the temple workers were thrilled to have a full session, they must not get that very often. We were talking to one of the workers from one of my old wards and she said "she wishes the missionaries could come to the temple every day, then they would have Salt Lake calling them and ask them what's going on in the Perth Temple? Why's there so much work getting done?" Well that would be easy enough to figure out, because there would be no missionary work getting done haha. But I really enjoyed the temple. I try to learn something new every time I go. Oh yeah! Shay and Ruth got to go to the temple on Wednesday to do baptisms for the dead. That was both of their first times going and doing that. They said they loved it. It was so pretty inside and they want to go back. They said they're going to try and do baptisms as often as they can before they get endowed so that they can just go back. We were so happy for them. They were able to find a babysitter last minute in order to be able to go. They were really happy too. When we saw them on Saturday we had a good discussion about temples and read about temples from the True to the Faith book. So we taught them about temples and then Shay taught me about AFL. Their team (St. Kilda) is in the Grand Finals this week. They gave me a St. Kilda scarf as a gift so I could let people know who I'm cheering for this Saturday, haha. that is going to be one of my favourite scarves for the rest of my life, because it's from one of my favourite families in WA. I'll attach a picture of me wearing the scarf, just so you can see what it looks like.

I had an interesting experience this week that I wanted to share. Earlier this week Elder Jack and I were studying from Jesus the Christ and it made reference to Mosiah chapter 15. I read Mosiah 15 and it really confused me. So I wanted to ask someone that was smarter than me to explain it to me, so I just left that question on my mind all day. With that question on my mind, the adversary started to attack me. It's not that I was doubting my testimony, just had a really major question about a gospel topic. That was a really tough day for me. We had people yelling profanities out the window at us (more than the usual), people telling us they didn't want us to come around anymore because they were going through a really hard time and didn't want any religion right now, it was just a really tough day. It was after someone yelled at us right in front of an investigator around 4pm that I decided to go home and answer that question myself. I figured the best person to ask would be the Lord. I almost immediately found D&C 93:3-4 and it was like I could see clearly again. From then on the week was just amazing. Not a single person yelled at us, and we had two amazing lessons with 2 people that want to get baptised and it was just so good. So lesson learned, if you have a question about anything, don't just let it sit in your mind for ages. Ask about it in prayer. "Ask and ye shall receive, knock and it shall be opened unto." duh!

I hope to be able to tell you next week that we have a baptismal date set with Angela, that's our goal for this week. But until then, I hope you all have an amazing week as well. The church is true, the book is blue! Never forget that.

Much love,

Elder Tanner

P.S. 6 More weeks in Kwinana with Elder Jack starts today. woo!

Slowish week

Maybe this week was actually a bit slower than slowish. It was slow. I knew I spoke too soon last week when I said I hadn't gotten sick yet. I got sick on Tuesday but was better by Wednesday evening. But that was a little more than 24 hours that I couldn't do anything. I literally had no energy on Tuesday, but on Wednesday I woke up feeling much better, thanks to the Zone Leaders coming over on Tuesday night and giving me a blessing. It was amazing the 180 degree turn my health took. On Tuesday night it took all of my energy to go from my bed to the kitchen and on Wednesday I felt good enough to actually go out and do stuff. I felt kinda bad actually because we were supposed to go on exchanges on Tuesday night so we had to reschedule them for this week. I'm pretty excited for exchanges though. I get to go with Elder Hampson and see what his area is like. See if it's just my area that's struggling or if it's just me. We just haven't seen a whole lot happen since I've been in this area. I think we could have been doing better if the past two weeks weren't plagued with sicknesses. Elder Jack actually got sick again on Saturday with just a stomach bug. We went to the Preedy's for their daughters 3rd birthday party and had to leave early because he felt like he was going to pass out, (which he did when we got out to the car.) And then we were in for the rest of the day. The party was good though. There were heaps of nonmembers there since Ruth is the only member in her family. It was sweet to have a good chat with some of them, and for them to see that missionaries aren't robots. One of the guys I was talking to was actually teaching me about Australian rules football, and it's quite interesting actually. I could never play it, but it's pretty fun to watch. The field is 180 metres long, and it's nonstop running. That alone means I will never play it haha.

I had one of the best conversations with a temple worker on Thursday night when we went to go eat at their house. Brother Couchman was his name. I don't know why, but family history has become very intriguing to me the past few weeks. He was showing me all about FamilySearch and how that website works and everything. I thought it was so cool. He showed me how he submitted a name to be done in the temple and all of the work for that name was done within 1 and a half months. It was cool though because the baptism was done in Nauvoo, the confirmation was done in Nashville, the initiatory was done in Rexburg and the Endowment was done in Boise. I had no idea that once you submit a name it could travel around like that. He explained to me that the way it works is the temple just prints out a list of names that need a certain ordinance done and those names come from that site. I've always wondered how temples seem to have a never ending supply of names to do work for. Well now I know. It just makes me sad to think that the Perth temple has actually had to cancel endowment session because there weren't enough people there. Some people must not understand the importance. Brother Couchman was telling me how he got to do the work for his older brother a few years back. I think that must be one of the coolest feelings, doing temple work for someone you love that has passed on. Even doing the work for someone you don't even know that's related to you, that would just be the coolest thing ever. That's just as exciting as getting a baptism on the mission I think. That's why I really want to get into genealogy when I get home. I've really grown to love it and I've never even done it for myself. If I have time today, I might go make an account on familysearch myself.

Not too much else happened this week. Father's Day was yesterday, so happy father's day dad! The area is still slowly but surely progressing. We actually had an investigator call us before church yesterday morning to say that she couldn't make it. That has never happened to me. Usually I just get to church and have to wait and see if they'll show up or not. So that at least shows some hope there. You could tell that she really wanted to come, but she was just too sick. So hopefully next week she can make it. We're teaching her a lesson on Thursday and it will probably be the first proper lesson that we've taught her since I got here. Usually we just go over and check on things, see how she's doing, see if she needs anything, answer any questions she might have from her reading. But this week we're getting into the meaty stuff. hooray!

For those that haven't studied the Tree of Life in awhile, it seems like we should all do that again. Within the past two weeks I've had a general authority talk to me about it, listened to two talks by apostles about it, and read the ensign article about it. It seems to be having a lot of importance at this point and time for some reason. There's just such a great importance for us to hold even tighter to the Iron Rod than we've ever held before. And also to hold the hands of those people whose hands might be just off of the rod. Even those that have already tasted the fruit are falling away. There's so many people on the other side that don't want us to reach that tree, but we have to. And make sure the rest of those we love get there as well.

Well that's about it for today. Hope you all have an amazing week. I'm praying for you, and holding your hand if you need me to.

Much love,

Elder Tanner