So Elder Lowe and I had a grunt day this past Friday, and for those that don't know what exactly a grunt day is, well, I'm sure that you can imagine in your mind just from the name of it. But basically, we tracted from 10:00 when we left the flat until sun down around 7:00ish. We didn't go home for lunch either so that we could be out among the people. It was terrific. On paper, it sounds really hard doing a grunt day, but I actually quite love it. You never go thirsty or anything, and as long as you take a lunch break later in the day so that it splits it up evenly, it's good fun. We met some really great people that day. We got let inside to 3 houses, which for tracting, that is really good. Only one of those three houses invited us back, and we only got to teach one lesson of those three house and it wasn't the same one that invited us back that we got to teach. The one that we got to teach was a Fijian lady and her housemate who was an Aussie guy. He wasn't really interested in sitting in on the lesson with us, but the Fijian lady was so nice. Her name was Bee. We knocked on the door, she opened it up and before we could even tell her about why we were knocking on her door, (all we said was that we were representative of Jesus Christ), she just said "Come in!" She sat down with us, gave us some water and some biscuits and cake and we had a great chat with her. She told us that she has heaps of family that are actually members of the church and she lived with some of them in California, but she never went to church with them because she's too staunch in her Pentecost Churches. She had a nephew that served a mission in Hawaii. She lived 15 minutes away from the Fiji Temple, and yet she had never heard the message of the restoration. We taught it quite powerfully I thought, bore strong testimony of the Book of Mormon, the whole 9 yards, and she wouldn't accept the invitation to read and pray about the Book of Mormon. I think a lot of times people just hear what they want to hear when we teach them. Otherwise, it would only make sense that there would need to be a restoration. But all we can do is invite, the rest is up to them. I just hope Bee chooses to accept the invitation somewhere down the road. So that was the only lesson we taught all day, but another house that we got let in to was a Kiwi family, who actually knows a family in our ward, the Hitas, and they were way nice. They were the ones that invited us back next week, but we didn't get to teach them then and there because it was just bad timing, they were really busy. I think we found a total of 8 different potential investigators that day, which is great. We just need to keep building up that potential pool so that we can build up our actual teaching pool from there.
We had another appointment this week with the Coromandels fall through. We went over on Wednesday to set up the appointment for Sunday, and when we went over on Sunday he told us that he had forgotten about some things that he needed to do that day so there wasn't going to be any time for us to teach them. He did want to reschedule for next week though, so that's good. It's easy to feel like people are trying to dodge you when you have 3 appointments fall through and they never answer your calls. But we keep praying for them and keep working with them. We can't be too quick to give up on people. Unless they straight up tell us that they don't want us around anymore, I'll never give up on the Coromandels. They're great.
We've been trying to focus on teaching more investigators and less actives in a day rather than active members. Usually we teach about 24 lessons in a week but about 15-18 of those are to active members and I feel like I'm just home teaching when that happens. The ideal situation would be to teach 24 lessons in a week and only 5 or 6 of them be to active members helping them with their missionary work. We had a lesson with one active family this week and we introduced this new family missionary plan that we're trying to get happening with all of the families in the ward, but they told us that they couldn't trust missionaries in the APM because of things they saw happening in the mission nearly 9 years ago and that reputation has apparently stuck with the mission over the years. I felt pretty bummed out after leaving that lesson. It just seemed like that was a pretty poor reason for not wanting to do missionary work. "I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men." I think that scripture applies in so many different ways in this situation. I'm sure the rest of the ward will have a good response to this family missionary plan. I'm looking forward to doing it with every family.
We had our ward activity on Saturday night. It was the one that was supposed to be Iron Chef, but it ended up just being a Potluck dinner. There aren't enough hours in a day of missionary life to have to plan a ward activity on top of all other responsibilities that we have. It turned out to be a great activity though. Lots of people complimented us on it. When I say lots though I mean about 3 or 4 of the families that came out of about 10 lol. It was good though. They came, we blessed the food, they ate, we shared a spiritual thought, (a quote about missionary work from M. Russel Ballard from the 2003 General conference), a closing prayer was said, we all cleaned up and went home. Simple but sweet.
So this week has been a great improvement over last week. And the coming week looks to be even better. We have a leadership training meeting this week as well as a Zone Leader council AS WELL as a Zone Meeting. So it's going to be one of those weeks. I'm looking forward to it though. I love those meetings and the spiritual experiences that they bring. Meetings are the best.
Not much else to say about this week. All is well in the Australia Perth [Rockingham] Mission. Hope yous have a great week! I'll talk to you all soon!
Much Love,
Elder Tanner
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