Finally!

I knew that this week would be the week that we finally set that baptismal date with Angela. It's going to be on October 28 and one of her favourite missionaries is going on home the 29th and he'll be doing the baptism. That would be a perfect way to end the mission I reckon. He's been really close with Angela ever since he served in this area a year ago, and now he gets to baptise her so he's way excited about that. She wants to be baptised in the ocean, so we're still seeing if we can get permission to do that. It's looking like it's not going to happen though. We don't know if she's opposed to getting baptised in a font or not, but we'll hopefully resolve that concern this week. The bishop said he thinks that if there is a font available you have to use it, but he wasn't sure about special requests or anything like that, so the Zone Leaders were going to ask President Cahoon for us. But anyways, we're really excited for the baptism, we just hope we can keep preparing her and make sure she doesn't fall away at the last minute or anything silly like that.

We weren't able to set the baptismal date with Evelyn this week. We were supposed to see her on Saturday. We even arranged for one of the members that could speak Tagalog from the other ward to come along and when we got there we found out that he was in Melbourne for the weekend. That would've been nice to know haha. We felt pretty bad about making Adam (the member that came with us) come with us just to have the appointment get cancelled. We didn't even have any other appointments or anything that he could come with us to. He did shout us some Maccas though which was cool. Maccas is Aussie for McDonald's for those that don't know. He actually had a really interesting story. He served in the Philippines 20 years ago then fell away from the church for awhile, he even got excommunicated at one time. Just recently he got re baptised and now he's like one of the strongest members in Rockingham ward. He was so keen to come teach with us even though he couldn't remember the language that well. We rescheduled the appointment for tonight though and he said he's still keen to come along. Hopefully now he's had time to study the language just a little bit so he can feel a bit more confident tonight when we go teach and get that baptismal date set! Then we'll have two baptisms scheduled for October. That would be mean!

We had a challenge this week that the zone that found the most new investigators would get to have an approved zone p-day. Apparently zone p-days aren't allowed anymore. But we could've gotten to have one. Unfortunately, even with our extra efforts, Elder Jack and I weren't able to find a single one. But we weren't the only ones in the zone that struggled with it. Even the zone leaders only found one I think. I think some of the other zones did really well. Warwick found like 25-30 or something like that. For some reason the people of Rockingham/Kwinana just have absolutely no interest in religion right now. Or maybe they never have. They just have really hard hearts and we're having a hard time finding those that have soft hearts. We know they're out there, we just haven't been able to find them. Even some of the people on our ward list have no interest in the gospel. We were on exchanges with the Zone Leaders on Saturday and I got to go with Elder Happel in my area and by 2pm we had run out of people to see and our set appointment wasn't until 6. We decided to visit some people on the ward list that we didn't know and nearly every door we knocked on we got a "sorry boys, I'm just not interested anymore". Or some doors we knocked on we actually got to go inside and have a chat with the person but it usually ended with "you're just not going to get me to come back to church anytime soon, sorry guys". It was pretty disappointing. I guess those are the people that get to taste the fruit of the tree but then they become ashamed because of what other people say and do and they fall away. And as missionaries there's not a whole lot we can do to help them come back. The last lady that we saw on Saturday was baptised 40 years ago or something. She was saying she doesn't know if there's a God and so we taught her that she can find out through prayer. She said she would give it a try and then we asked if we could say a prayer before leaving and she totally shut us down. Told us "what's the point of praying if I don't even believe?" So yeah, we don't think she's going to pray on her own, and if she does, I think she already has an answer in her head so she won't listen to the real answer. We'll still follow up with her sometime next week or something and see how it goes, if we're lucky, she'll have some amazing change of heart. But we'll see.

Sounds like conference was really good, as always. We're looking forward to watching it down here this coming weekend. Conference weekend on the mission is always one of the best weekends from what I remember from last time. I'm so excited. Hopefully something really good is said that will really help us in this mission to be able to find those that are searching for truth. I talked to Shay yesterday and he said he's already been watching some clips from conference on the Internet because he thought he missed it. He's the man. But I told him we watch them this weekend and he was relieved lol.

We'll pray for a great week this week. We even fasted to help us find those people, so it should be a superbulous week. Obedience is the key though!

Have a super week, love you all!

Elder Tanner