So let me just run you through what my schedule was like for this past week, then I'll tell you about it. So Monday was p-day, and in the evening we went over to a less-active/part member family's house and also got a haircut over there. Tuesday we had leadership meeting from 9-3 and at 3 we exchanged with the Jandakot Elders so I got to spend 24 hours in their area working with Elder Narhwold. After the unexchange on Wednesday, elder Lowe and I spent a couple of hours trying to visit people, but then spent the rest of the evening planning our training for our Zone Meeting on Friday. On Thursday we had Zone Leader council from 9-3 again, and afterwards we did some tracting and then finished planning our meeting for friday. The meeting on Friday went from 9:30-11:30 and afterwards we went to Kwinana to help with a service project that ended up going until about 4, including the time for the barbecue afterwards. After that we exchanged with Kwinana and Elder Shobbrook and I got to work together again but this time it was in Waikiki. On Saturday after our unexchange we drove up to Shelley to do a blitz in their area with 14 other missionaries (which yielded 31 potential investigators for them). Then from then on, it was back to normal proselyting schedule. So as you can see, this week has been absolutely hectic. Pretty much nonstop for 6 days straight. So it's nice to finally have a bit of a break today, it's much needed. But even today I think we're going to be running all over the place.
So the leadership meeting on Tuesday was really good. The majority of the time was spent talking about how to run an effective meeting. Each of the Zone Leaders gave a training on a different aspect of an effective meeting. Ours was on setting goals and leaving/following up on commitments. Our training wasn't too long but basically we talked about how following up is the absolute most important part of the commitment pattern. It was kind of funny when we were talking about it I felt like I should ask "what is the commitment patter?" You would think that a meeting full of district leaders and zone leaders, someone would be able to answer that pretty quickly. Maybe the people that knew the answer were just holding back so they could let somebody else answer it. But it was pretty surprising when it wasn't answered straight away. So hopefully everyone was able to get something from our training. I know that I was able to get something from it, as well as from every body elses training. The Southern River ZLs gave a training on how to include games or just participation into your meetings and I think I took the most from that one. I'm usually not very good at thinking of good creative games for meetings and stuff, but I was able to do it for our zone meeting on Friday, but we'll get to that. Leadership meetings are always good because we get to see a lot of missionaries that usually we all know, so it's good. I got to see Elder Jorgensen which is always a good reunion. Sister Cahoon gave a really good training on the difference between a leader and a manager and the different leadership qualities we should strive to develop as leaders in the mission. I really liked that training. I took heaps of notes. I love taking notes, aye. I always learn so much more when I do.
My exchange with Elder Narhwold in Jandakot was way fun. I love being around Americans that like to talk about sports and stuff like that. He was a speed skater back home. He even qualified for the Olympic trials, but he decided to come on a mission. He's a really good guy. I think we spent the whole exchange just talking to each other (when we weren't teaching of course). We had some really good teaching appointments too. One was a member present lesson with this guy named Rudy from El Salvador. We had him kneel and pray with us then and there to ask God if the Book of Mormon was true. He said the most sincere prayer that I've ever heard an investigator give. Hepleaded with Heavenly Father to know the truth. It was a great experience. I want more spiritual experiences with investigators like that. They can be hard to come by sometimes though. Apparently Rudy even came to church yesterday as well which is awesome. He's been an investigator for a really long time and has never come before. The member that was with us in the lesson was amazing as well. He bore a powerful testimony which was more powerful than any testimony Elder Narhwold or I could have born because he was a convert. So yeah, it was a great exchange.
Zone Leader Council was good as always on Thursday. We spent a bulk of the time counseling on different missionaries in the mission and the pros and cons of staying in an area longer than normal and with staying with a companion for a long time. There were a lot of cons surprisingly enough. I think that means that this upcoming transfer in two weeks there will be a lot of people getting transferred. We'll just have to wait and see what happens. President Cahoon gave us some training on BIF BAM! Which means "Bring in families, baptise a man". It was a focus that his mission president had on his mission back in the day and he feels like it will be a good focus for us to have as well. Even though we're meant to be baptising families, there hasn't been enough focus on it lately. And there definitely hasn't been enough focusing on teaching the man of the house. A lot of times missionaries will just teach the wife and kids because the man isn't interested. But President Cahoon told us that we just basically need to man up and lay it down for him. Of course we'll do it in the nicest way possible, but we need to let the potential priesthood holders know just that, their potential. If we focus more on the head of the household, we feel like that will bring more families into the church. Over the last year we only had 7 full families brought into the church. The rest of our baptisms were just individuals. So hopefully with our new focus on kneeling prayers and BIF BAM we start to see more success in missionary work in the near future.
So the Zone Meeting on Friday was pretty good. I feel like it could have been better though. We spent a lot of time planning it out on Wednesday but then after the training we received at ZLC, we wanted to take all of that training to the Zone. So it wasn't as planned out as it could have been. We mainly spoke about different things that we could do to focus on finding and teaching families. One thing that we implemented was a new number to correlate on at the end of each week and that is "hours finding". That's something that's not really recorded and when performance is recorded, it improves. so we're hoping that it leaves a good impression on those in our zone. At the end we played a game to help missionaries open their mouths to anyone. It was kind of like charades in a way. Elder Lowe and I wrote 20 different people and then 20 different actions on little slips of paper and so someone had to come up, pick a person that they were going to be and then an action. We got a lot of different funny combinations. A blind man dancing, Mario sleeping, Barack Obama talking to his neighbor, a hippie walking a dog, etc. Then the other missionary had to contact the person who was acting. There were a lot of good laughs. I wish I could have recorded some of it for you. It was great. I just hope people enjoyed it as much as we though they would.
Our service in Kwinana included going over to this nonmember couples house and cleaning the backyard. The house they were in previously belonged to a hoarder, so there's was HEAPS of junk everywhere. We were working for about 3 and a half hours and we had a pile of rubbish about a metre and a half tall and a couple of metres long. They're going to need to get a Bobcat in there or something to get rid of all the rubbish. I couldn't believe how much junk there was. And apparently the lady who used to live there wanted to come and go through the pile of rubbish to see if there was anything she wanted to take. that's when you know there's a problem. there was no way that there was anything in that pile of junk worth keeping. Afterward Angela cooked us up a Barby which was nice, but the Barby caught on fire and the food wasn't all that great haha. Oh well. It was good fun to be on exchange with Elder Shobbrook. He's changed for the better since I trained him. I think it's just that he has adjusted to mission life finally. We had some good fun together. Haha funny story real quick, we went to this less active's house, one who I had never met before, and knocked on the door (it was a pretty new house) and when he came to the door he said "holy cow.... how the heck did you guys get my address? come in" Then after talking for about 5 minutes he stopped and then said "but seriously, how did you get my address?" Hahaha, we think his dad who is active in rockingham ward gave his address to our ward clerk or something. It was a funny experience though. He was cool with us, but not really with church. His wife is a nonmember, so he's just not too keen on having us come and teach or anything. But it was still good to meet him.
Sunday was a bit of an off day. We had FOUR appointment cancel on us. One with the Coromandels (again) which I was most disappointed about, because now it just feels like they're dodging us. But I'm not going to give up hope. Not now, not ever. I think once I get a new companion, if he's the right person, maybe we'll be able to get back in there with them. It was pretty sad about the other 3 appointments as well, but oh well. We have a fresh week ahead of us. It HAS to be better this week. We probably only had like 10 hours total of proselyting this past week, so it should be better.
Well that's about it from down under this week. Hope you all are enjoying life. It's still uber hot down here, but there's hope for this weekend, it's supposed to get down to 25 degrees Celsius! That will be a nice day :)
Love you all!
Elder Tanner
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