Thankgiving this week??

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

G'day, Elder Tanner speaking...

Wowzers! What an amazingly long week. First let me explain the subject. I never imagined that being a district leader would involve making so many phone calls. It seems like every day the Zone Leaders are ringing me up and asking me to ask my district something then I have to call everybody and then call the zone leaders back. Or like missionaries in my district will just be randomly ringing me up asking questions. I don't know, it doesn't sound like much, but it definitely feels like a lot. I definitely use the phone heaps more than I used to that's for sure. I am loving it though, being a district leader though. This week we had a leadership meeting as well as a zone conference. That was my first leadership meeting to ever go to, but I liked it way more than zone conference I reckon. Mostly because everybody that was there I knew because they're all people that have been on their mission for just as long as me at least, whereas at zone conference there's always heaps of new missionaries that you don't really know. We learned about the same thing at both meetings so it was a bit tedious, but it was still fun. The thing that was cool about Leadership meeting was that I got to role play my district meeting for the Zone Leaders and they got to tell me what I did well or didn't do well. The only thing is that I had to teach the same thing that I taught at my last district meeting, which they were at, so it was basically just a re practice, they were just seeing if I had adjusted the things that I needed to make better. Such as making it last only 45 minutes and getting the district more involved. It was also sort of different because I got to teach it with the other district leader in our zone, Elder Blair. It was kinda just like we were teaching a normal lesson to them. I was actually really surprised at how well we were able to teach together since we had never really taught together before. I ran really smoothly. Even more smoothly than some lessons I've had after being with a companion for 10 weeks. I don't know why, it just clicked along really well.

Elder Jorgensen and I have still been on the bikes every single day. We're supposed to have the car Friday-Monday, but that just doesn't seem long enough. It seems like the time we need it most is when we don't have it, but I guess that's probably just all in my head, because there's no way that you're going to get me to bike 60 kms on Sunday. Especially with the heat coming up soon. Very soon. Can't wait for that!

We had a pretty cool experience this week with one of our neighbours. I don't know if I've ever talked about him but his name is Joe and we help him out whenever he needs it because he's always really nice to us. This week he asked us to come over and bless his house because he and his wife haven't been having good feelings in that house like they want to be having. He's lost a couple of jobs in the past couple of months and he was supposed to be finding out later that day if he was going to be getting this new job or if he was going to remain unemployed for the time being. Before we blessed the house he was telling us how he knows that we can help him with this because we've helped him with so many things in the past, but he wanted us to know where he stood with religion and he basically wasn't going to be changing anytime soon because he's too staunch a catholic. But anyways, we blessed the house, prayed that he would get the job and then didn't hear back from him for a couple of days. But when we did hear from him again he came over all excited and told us that he got the job and he knows that it was because of our prayers. It was such a good experience. And even though he's not going to change any time soon, we at least know that he has a good testimony of prayer, so that's something that we can totally work with down the road.

The reason that I'm emailing so late today is because this morning we went to this wildlife park and it was so cool. It's the closest I've ever been to Kangaroos, and Dingos, and Wallabys, and Camels, it was so much fun. We had a big bucket of food that we got to go around and feed all the animals with. My favourite was definitely getting to feed the Kangaroos. They're so awesome. I wish I could bring one home and have it as a pet. These ones at this park were just so lax, you could come right up to them and pet them and feed them. Wild ones won't let you get near that close. Oh and I got to pet a koala, which is also very soft awesome, but they would make boring pets, sleeping 20 hours a day "to conserve energy". I wonder what they're saving all that energy for.

I get to go on exchanges with my district starting this week. Starting tonight actually. I'm pretty excited. Especially for the one tonight. We're exchanging with rockingham and I get to be in Rockingham with Elder Metekingi. It's going to be so good. Our goal is to invite 20 people to church for the upcoming Sunday. We'll see how that goes. But I'm uber excited either way. Elder Metekingi and Elder Abel are the best. I wouldn't mind serving around those 2 Elders for my whole mission. I love those guys. Not only are they just good people to be around, but they help me out heaps with being a district leader. They're always giving me the encouragement and everything that I need and helping me to be the example to the district that I want to be. If I'm lucky maybe I'll even get to serve with one of them down the road.

Well I'm attaching some pictures from my morning. Hope you enjoy them!

I hope you all have a great week! Pray for a missionary experience! You WILL get them!

Much love,

Elder Tanner

Elder Jorgenson!

What a great week!

So as you all know, Elder Jack got transferred and my new companion wasn't going to be here until Thursday. So since Elder Jack left I got to go with Elder Blair who is the other district leader in the zone and work in his area with him on Wednesday night. It was really good because even though he has a car, we rode bikes for most of the night. It made me excited and made me want to ride bikes more, because I think Elder Jack and I only rode bikes 2 or 3 times the entire time we were together. Also on Thursday I was talking to Sister Cahoon and she said something that hit me as well. She said that more missionary work gets done when you're on bikes; and isn't that the truth. So on Thursday morning Elder Blair and I drove back to the mission office and waited to get our new companions (along with the other 2 missionaries that were training). My companion's name is Elder Jorgenson. He's from Seattle, Washington and he's been serving in the Alabama Montgomery Mission for 6 months. He said that the reason it took so long for him to get his visa was that when he got the FBI clearance in the mail, his dad didn't know what it was or what it was for and he just threw it away so he had to apply for it again and that alone can take 4 months. So he ended up serving a quarter of his mission in Alabama. I think that must be a huge culture shock, I mean, going from a mission where everybody is somewhat religious to a mission where over half the doors you knock on the people tell you that they don't even believe in God. But he's doing really well. I'm glad that the only thing that I have to train him in is the Aussie ways. I've been getting to teach him all the Aussie slang words they use, teaching him what to say and not say, even trying to help him with his accent as well. I can't believe how heavy his American accent is. It's weird to me. He told me that I have a bit of an Aussie accent as well. Which is understandable since his accent just sounded so American to me. Whenever we've talked to people this week they've been like "you're obviously American," but then turned to me and asked me where I'm from. haha, I guess I just don't notice that my accent has changed. It's been funny teaching him about all the different Aussie things and sayings. It's weird to think that I was in his same spot just a year ago. The one thing that I haven't taught him yet is how to drive on the left side of the road. He just says he's not ready for that yet, but it will come.

But like I was saying, when I was with Elder Blair, I got really motivated to get on the bikes more. So Elder Jorgenson and I have only used the car to get to Rockingham for church and morning exercise and stuff like that. But on Saturday we spent 7 hours on the bikes. We were only able to see 3 people, but it was really good to be able to get out there and talk to people that we passed by on the street. You can't really do that when you're in the car. So it's been a really good week in that sense. I'm definitely going to stick with it, even when it gets up to the high 30's next month, I'll just be drinking heaps and heaps of water, that's all. I'm sure I can do it though.

My first week as a district leader has been great as well. I was nervous to run my first district meeting on Friday, but it actually went really well. Everything ran smooth and it actually lasted as long as it was supposed to. It actually went a bit longer than it was supposed to. I gave them some training on the importance of getting investigators to come to church and how they can receive revelations and spiritual truths through church attendance. It was a lot easier to give training to the whole district than I thought it would be. Everybody was participating and all that, it was good. Afterwards, the zone leaders evaluated me and said it was really good for being my first time. I just have one or two things that I need to improve for my next time around, so we'll see how that goes in two weeks. We don't have a district meeting this week because of Zone Conference which is happening on Wednesday. Also tomorrow I get to go to a leadership training meeting in Dianella. I'm pretty excited for that. Lots of firsts for me this week and last week. There seems to be a lot of things that you can only learn as a district leader or zone leader. I've been learning a lot more from everything i do. My studying, meetings, correlating, everything. Correlating with everybody in my district was a different experience as well. It seems like everybody talks to me with more respect than they all have in the past, but I guess that just comes with the calling. I'm just going to have to work to keep that respect. And the best way to do that is just to lead by example, which so far isn't as hard as I thought it would be.

I'm so excited for the new experiences that I'm going to have this transfer. It is looking way promising. Angela got up in testimony meeting yesterday to bare her testimony and it was fantastic. I was worried she might say something that we didnt' teach her, but she bore a great testimony on the living God, the Book of Mormon, and the great work the missionaries are doing. It made me smile heaps. She's progressing very well in the gospel. She also working really hard to get her husband to come to Church with her. He has actually sat in with on on our past two lessons which is amazing.

Evelyn is doing really well right now too. Arturo says "she's ready to be baptised, she's just procrastinating". She says she wants to be baptised in the Philippines, or she wants to learn English better first. I think it will just be a matter of time. We're getting excited though, and I think Arturo is as well. Her English is so much better than it used to be. It's so good to see the spirit working in action on her. Even though she doesn't understand much of what we say, she is liking our messages more and more. It's great.

I think that's about it for this week! Have a superally fantastic week!

much love,

Elder Tanner

Mission P-day Today!!!

Sorry this email is a bit later than usual. We've had a crazy amazing day. So 3 weeks ago the APs challenged us as a mission to find 250 new investigators and set 33 baptismal dates in 3 weeks, and if we did that, then we would be having a mission p-day. Most of us thought it was not really going to happen because 250 is heaps, but we found 296 new investigators and set 40 baptismal dates. It's amazing the things that can happen when you set your goals high AND have a reward for achieving said goals. So our day started at 6:30 where most of our zone met at a park and practiced our rugby skills. We did that until about 7:30 and then went home, showered and got ready, and then by 8:30 went to the shops to buy our zone uniforms. For the mission p-day there was an award for the best dressed zone and an award for overall winners of the 3 sports we played (rugby, basketball, and ultimate frisbee). So we went to buy our uniforms which were just pink polos and anything else pink that we could find to wear. I got some pink shoelaces for my converse, some got pink cowboy hats, we all had pink face paint like the stuff football players wear, it was mad. We ended up winning the best dressed zone, so at least we won something haha. It was really good just to see everybody though at the same time. It's pretty rare for the whole mission to get together somewhere, especially for something like this, so it was way fun. We did ok in the sports though, well in rugby anyways. We didn't lose a single rugby game, got 3rd place (out of 4) in basketball which I was the team captain for, and dead last in ultimate frisbee. I think out of the 4 or 5 games of frisbee that we played, we only scored once or twice haha. Good times though. I hope we get to do that again sometime.

This week has been really busy. Not only because we've been trying to find new investigators like crazy, but because of the planning of Angela's baptism. By the way, we found 5 new investigators this week, that's the highest we've ever found in a week in this area since I've been here, so we were pretty proud about that. In fact, I think for the last week of the challenge, as a mission we needed 102 new investigators and our zone alone found something like 58, so that was awesome.

We've been driving all over the place trying to get this baptism planned this week. As you know, she wants to be baptised in the ocean. So we've been driving all along the beaches around here to look for a place that would be private enough and that would be good for having a baptism. We found one place that we liked, but it's like 20 kms away. And when we told Angela about it she said that it wasn't the place she had in mind, so we had to drive back and try to find this place that she was describing to us and we couldn't find it anywhere. She couldn't even find it on the map so I don't know why we went and tried to look for it. It will probably end up being at the place we picked out but we have to go and see Ange tomorrow and finalise it. We'll probably have her go with us to the place or follow her to her place that she seems to know. Another complication that we've run into is that with the baptism being at 4:30 on a week day, nobody from the bishopric can be there, our ward mission leader can't be there, we finally ended up getting the High Priest group leader to be able to come, so he'll be the presiding authority at the baptism. We were talking to Brother Foot, our ward mission leader and he was saying that he's actually been to a couple of ocean baptisms and all that happens is probably just an opening prayer, a few remarks from... somebody, the performance of the baptism, then closing prayer and go home. We'll probably have Elder Murray say a few things since he's the one baptising her and he seems to be able to connect with her unlike any of us can. Overall, it looks like it should be an alright baptism, it's just the planning of that has been hectic. It's taken up a lot of our time this week, as well as reteaching Angela all of the lessons again. This week we taught her about prayer because we found out that she doesn't know how to say a proper prayer. And we also taught her about sabbath day observance because we found out that she goes to the markets after church on Sunday. It's amazing the things you find out a week before the baptism.

We finally got to see the Preedy's yesterday after almost 2 weeks of not being able to come over. Ever since they found out that she's pregnant again he's started working more, even picked up a night job, and so he's busy as. He says that he's going to drop the night job though. He wants more time to be able to spend with his family and with 2 jobs, he's just not getting it. It was good though seeing them last night. His sister has just recently moved in with them and she's a less active member, so we had a really good lesson with them about Helaman 5:12. Shay gave most of the lesson though, we just started talking about it and went into building our foundations upon Christ a little bit and then he pretty much took it away from there. His testimony is amazingly strong. They are so going to make it to the temple in April. He actually gave a talk in church yesterday and it was really good especially since he said that he didn't have any time to prepare it. He even got a bit emotional near the end when he was baring his testimony, which I've never seen him do. You could tell he was feeling the spirit. And he bore his testimony again when we were having that lesson with them last night. You could tell that Ruth even has a pretty good testimony for only being a member for 6 months now. She was trying to get her sister (who also lives with them) to participate in the lesson and was asking her questions and all that. She really wants her sister to know what she knows. Just a really good time last night. I can't wait for them to go to the temple in April, that will just help their testimonies that much more.

Speaking of temples, I saw on LDS.org that they just had the ground breaking ceremony for the Rome, Italy temple. How cool is that? I never thought I'd see the day that there would be a temple just down the road from the Vatican. That's how you know this church is growing all over the world. Even in Catholic central, they have enough members to need a temple. I just thought that was a nifty bit of information I'd share in case you all didn't already know, but you probably did.

I'm attaching some pictures from our Mission p-day, hope you enjoy them.

Much love! Have a fantastic week!

Elder Clark Tanner

Obedience brings about blessings, Exact obedience brings about miracles!

Well this week has been... kinda average I guess. We had a visit with Angela on Tuesday that did not go well. She started going off on about how it was wrong for her children to be baptised when and how they were. Mostly because of the way they are living now, she doesn't feel like they should have been baptised if they weren't going to commit to living the commandments. We tried to explain to her the principle of agency and how it's not the church's fault that they aren't living the way they should be. We actually found out that that's the main reason she doesn't want to be baptised in a font. Because her children were baptised there and they shouldn't have been, according to her. And if you knew Angela, you would know that once she has an opinion on something like this, it's nearly impossible to change that opinion. I've found that getting her to feel the spirit is actually really hard. However, towards the end of our conversation on Tuesday we started talking about conference and how she liked it. She said she loved it. She loved it because it felt like the speakers were talking directly to her and that they answered some of the questions that we haven't been able to fully answer for her. I know that she felt the spirit in that at least. She didn't come to church yesterday because she was feeling a bit sick, which was actually a pretty big bummer because bishop was going to talk to her about her baptism and try to convince her to be baptised in a font. I think bishop is pretty keen on not doing the ocean baptism. We only have 10 more days to plan this baptism too. We're probably going to just have bishop call her tonight and have a chat about it over the phone. That way when we go see her tomorrow hopefully she'll have had a change of heart. But we'll see. I am excited to see her tomorrow though. I'll be with my district leader on an exchange and maybe he'll be able to help her in ways Elder Jack and I can't think of. Mainly it's just trying to plan this baptism that's made this week a bit stressful. Every time I think about it, I'd rather just think about something else... but that won't help it get planned haha. After tomorrow though we should be able to get the planning rolling. After Bishop Chessel and Elder Foster have a chat with her that is.

Our teaching with Evelyn is actually going much better. This week we taught her about the Atonement and how she can pray to know that the things we have been teaching are true. I can't really say if she accepted the invitation to pray or not, but I know that her husband is going to strongly encourage her to do so. We can really see the spirit working on her slowly but surely though. She seems to understand a bit more every time. I don't think it will be as long as I originally though until she decides to get baptised. But we'll just have to see about that.

A new family moved into our ward this week and they are the best. Well, I don't know if they're family because they all have different last names, but they're Maori which pretty much means they're automatically family. They moved over from Brisbane for work and are staying for a year. Apparently there's going to be 9 people living in that house once all of them get here. 5 of them are members and 4 aren't. The 5 that are members (Brother Takairangi, Bro Makai, Bro Brown, Bro Taraungi, and another one I haven't met) are all keen on sharing the gospel with the 4 that aren't members. We haven't bet those 4 yet because they haven't arrived from Brisbane yet, but when they do arrive, they want us over to meet them. We really hope that they are keen on hearing the gospel, and maybe even coming to church with their housemates. I love meeting new people like this that automatically love the missionaries. They just got in past Tuesday. Found out our number somehow and had us come over by Friday. They wanted us to come over to give the the chapel and temple address and to bring some books of Mormon for their friends/brother/cousins/whatevertheyare. They even told us in church yesterday that if they ever need someone to come teaching with us, just give them a ring. I don't think I've ever had someone tell me that in this area. But yeah, we're super excited to have them in our area. We always need more strong members in this area. And the Lord just blessed us with 5 of them which is great.

We got to do some service this week that involved breaking down a wall and tearing up a roof. I felt kinda like we were cleaning up after an earthquake when we were picking up all the pieces. Just roof and wall scattered all over the place. It was pretty fun. I love doing service for people, aye. And we got to help the Terepais move which was fun because the Zone Leaders were on exchanges with the AP's which meant Elder Crawley was there. I hadn't seen him since I left my last area. He actually gave me some really exciting news. Because he's an AP now he knows a lot about what's going on around the mission. If you remember me talking about Trent Dashwood in my last area and how we were teaching him? Well I found out that he's getting baptised and he wants me to be there! Elder Crawley said he would get to me with all the details on when the baptism is, but I'm so excited. He said it's either at the end of October or early November. But I'll definitely be able to go. Woo! That was probably the highlight of my week right there. (That and finding out that OU is #1 in the BCS, woo!)

That's about it for this week. I love you all. Keep up all the amazing things that you do!

Elder Clark Tanner

General Conference was amazazing!

So we spent the last two days just watching conference at the chapel. All three Saturday sessions and both Sunday sessions. I'd have to say my favourites were Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon. Elder Holland gave such an inspiring talk on Saturday, as he usually does. President Uchtdorf also gave a really good talk in that same session I think. Talking about how we should slow down in life sometimes when the going gets tough. We don't want to overwhelm ourselves when bad stuff happens because that just makes it worse. I still can't believe I never used to watch the Saturday sessions back home, those always seem to be the best ones. I'm so thankful for our prophet though. You can definitely tell from the love that he has for each and every one of us reflects the love that God has for each and every one of us as well. You can hear it in his words and see it in his face.

This past week we taught Evelyn twice. The first time didn't go so well. Well it went well, but we learned that she has a lot of concerns and she's not anywhere close to baptism. We brought with us Caleb Simpkins who was able to talk to them in Tagalog. We found out that it's not only the language barrier that keeps her from talking to us, but she really is just super shy. I felt really useless in that lesson though because basically Caleb was just reteaching everything that we had already taught her in Tagalog. And then after the lesson he said that she just wasn't ready yet. We had been planning on committing her to baptism in that lesson as well. It's going to be awhile before that can happen. Caleb reckons if she keeps going to church and reading the Book of Mormon with Arturo and if we keep coming over to teach, she'll be ready someday down the road. And yesterday when we taught them again we saw that already starting to come true. Yesterday we finally got the Tagalog reading materials for her and so we went over the first part of the restoration. Starting with God is our loving heavenly father and teaching her all about Christ's earthly ministry and then the apostasy. We had her read the part about apostasy in her own language and I could finally see a light of understanding in her eyes. It was just amazing. I really hope that we can just keep that up and start to see great changes in her life. I really love Arturo and Evelyn and I think that's why I want to see her get baptised, because I know that would make Arturo so happy and I want that happiness for him. It's the happiness that comes from families being in and living the gospel. There's no other happiness in the world that can beat it or even match it.

We saw Angela this week and it looks like we're going to be doing her baptism in the ocean. She wouldn't budge on getting baptised in a font. We even talked to her about how the chapel is a dedicated house of the Lord and she would be able to have a really spiritual experience there, we tried to get her to feel the spirit in that, but we failed. Then we read Moroni 6:1-4 and talked about the requirements for baptism. Mainly being humbled and having a broken heart and contrite spirit. It's hard to tell if she's really ready for baptism, but I guess we'll find out when we have the baptismal interview in the next couple of weeks. And we just gotta keep teaching her and helping her to feel the spirit in the things we say.

We had a Zone meeting on Friday and it was really good. The Zone Leaders challenged the whole zone to tract every day at 4 o clock and begin with a prayer. So the first day we did that we didn't find any new investigators but we still had a really amazing experience. The first street that Elder Jack chose I told him that I didn't really feel good about that street so he chose another one and we decided to go to that one. The very first door that we knocked on somebody came to the door that we already knew. It was Loraine Brennan. I don't remember if I ever told you about her but she's way less active and she's really trying to get her life in order right now. But she was at this house and she was getting it shown to her by the Realtor. It was a really nice house too compared to what she was living in before. Her house before was basically falling apart. But basically if we hadn't knocked on that door on that precise day at that precise time, we probably would've never found her again because I think she's moving out tomorrow. I think with an experience like, you can't deny that the church is true and the we are not alone in this work.

I love being in the work of the Lord and I try to better myself in it every day. Some days can be harder than others but I always think of Christ on those days and know that he will help me. Even if I can't tell at the time, he will always help me.

Love yous! Have a Tremendolishious week!

Elder Tanner

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