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
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