Elder Hamula's Visit

This was amazing! Well I guess I should say it had it's ups and downs. One major up was that Elder Hamula from the Area Presidency came and toured our mission this week and he spoke to us in our Zone Conference on Friday. He taught us so many amazing things. The main thing he spoke about was the Tree of Life and the law of obedience. He said that some people think this mission has a bad reputation among apostles but the only reason that people think that is because a lot of the apostles and general authorities served in Australia so they hold it to a higher standard so they hold us to a higher standard. And I guess it can be hard for some people being held at even a higher standard than regular mission standards, but I think it helps us a lot. It shows that they have a lot of trust in us because I doing think we would have been sent to this mission if they didn't think that we would be able to live up to the standards that have been set for us. You could definitely feel the spirit within the room while Elder Hamula was addressing us. Towards the end he opened it up for questions and a lot of really good questions were asked, both about doctrine and how to become a more consecrated missionary. And you could tell the spirit was in there because as soon as Elder Hamula began speaking to answer a question it was like the spirit would teach us right away what the answer was before he even finished. It was amazing because you just knew that everybody was on the same page and understood the answers and everything. It was so good. One question that somebody asked was why is it neccessary for us to have a wife to reach exaltation, which I thought was kind of a silly question because who wouldn't want a wife, but he answered it in a very simple way and then started talking about how important it is to have a companion in our lives. He told this story from when he was young, I think, and I'll try to explain it as well as he did. An old man once asked him, "you know how we used to train horses? We would teather a wild and crazy horse to a donkey and let them off into the pasture. Leave them for about 6 or 7 months and come back and see how they went. When you came back, you would discover that the donkey moved a bit quicker and the horse and calmed down a bit. So your end result is you get a better horse AND a better donkey. You get it?" I thought that story was so good. Sometimes I wonder which one I am, the horse or the donkey. I thought it was something good to think about. But anyways yeah, Elder Hamula was so good. And this was like they 3rd time a general authority has shown up at one of our zone conferences on my mission. I must be pretty lucky.

One other thing from zone conference that I loved was this scripture that President Cahoon shared with us. It's 2 Nephi 9:39. Read that verse and then circle the first letter of each of the last five words, and keep in mind that President Cahoon was a dentist before he came out. I love that verse now and I'm always going to remember that one and be able to share it with everybody. Oh ok, TWO other things from zone conference. The second thing was the lunch. This was BY FAR the best Zone Conference lunch that I've ever had. It was put on by my ward which is just full of Polynesians so it was a very poly lunch. Having served with a Polynesian and one of my favorite families being Polynesian, (the Berrymans), I just loved it. Elder Glover has never served with a Polynesian and so he didn't really like it. But I loved it. Oh yeah, I got to see Elder Glover which was sweet. I can't believe he only has 6 months left. When he started training me he was at where I am now, which means before I know it, I'll probably have 6 months left as well. I just can't believe how fast time flies. Amazing. I think that's it about Zone Conference, but I'm sure I'll think of more to tell you as soon as I click send on this email.

Another thing that made this week so good was Stake Conference yesterday. We got to drive down to Mandurah for it which is about a 20-30 minute drive depending on how fast you go on the back roads. ;) It was held at the Mandurah Performing Arts Centre which is a really nice place. Everybody hung around for like and hour and a half afterwards because everything was so pretty. It sat right on a boat harbor so everybody was just standing around having a good chat taking in the sights I guess. Every single speaker that spoke in conference shared a really good message and they all connected to each other. It was really funny as soon as Sister Cahoon started to speak all of the kids got really quiet. Just goes to show you how much of a loving person she is. She told this story from The Chronicles of Narnia and tied it to the gospel. I've never heard a stake conference so quiet. It was so good. After Stake Conference Shay was getting the Melchizedek priesthood and we wanted to come watch. So we waited around for awhile because there were 7 other people getting ordained and Shay was the last but when we finally got it, Shay asked me to participate in ordaining him. I was so not expecting that since I've only been in the area for 3 weeks but I guess I've already built up that good of a relationship with him and his wife that he wanted me in the circle. His dad came down from Merriwa, about an hour away, to ordain him which was really cool. I bet his dad has been looking forward to that day for a really long time and probably thought it would never come at some point.

After Stake Conference they invited over for dinner and some games. All in all, best day ever. I did the math and if I'm in this area for 6 transfers (aka ages) I'll get to be here when they go to the temple. If anything I'll be here the whole time they're preparing and then get transferred out right before it happens, just like it happened with Sophie and Blair. But I'll be happy either way, just as long as they get there.

One of the down points of this week was Elder Jack was sick so we didn't get to do a whole lot of work towards the end of the week, he had to save up his energy for those two really important meetings aforementioned. But he's doing a bit better now. And I've been doing a pretty good job at staying healthy which is always a good thing. Usually when this bug goes around the mission I always get it but I've been doing everything in my power to not get it.

Trying to think of anything else spectacular that happened this week. but Zone and Stake Conferences were definitely the highlights.

I hope you all had an amazing week and are staying awesome. I love each and every one of you.

Elder Tanner

Happy Birthday, Clark!

Week 2 of Kwinana - Lovin it!

I have to say, this is definitely the most awesome ward I've been in on my mission, the Baldivis ward. We had a ward activity on Saturday called a progressive dinner. I don't know if you've ever heard of that but it's probably the best idea ever. Well, except for maybe a chili cook-off. But anyways, everyone signs up to bring either an appetizer, a main course, or a dessert. Everyone goes to one house for the appetizers, a 2nd house for the main courses, and a 3rd house for the desserts. Any missionary would love this activity because we basically got 3 feeds in one night. It was amazing. There was probably about 100 people that showed up so luckily the 3 houses we went to had a pretty big backyard because if we all had to stay inside it would've been crammed. The 3rd families house even had a basketball court and a playhouse for the kids. It was just so cool. You can tell how unified this ward is. I can't wait to get to know everybody in it better, cause right now I only know a few families.

Not much else happened this past week. We got 2 new investigators so our total is up to 4 now. So we still got a ways to go before we have any real progress in this area. But hopefully we can set a baptismal date with one of our investigators. We gave her a triple combination and she's been reading it a lot lately. Even though she's been an investigator for a really long time, we feel pretty good that she's ready, and she's even mentioned that she thinks she's almost ready. She just wants to do it right. She also has a lot of family influence on her that is making it difficult, but I think we had a really good impression on her dad the other night before he went back to Tasmania. The he played us so Johnny Cash on his guitar haha.

This week is going to be so good, I can already tell. We have Zone Conference on Friday and Stake Conference on Sunday. Elder Hamula of the Seventy is going to be coming for our Zone Conference, and anytime there's a General Authority at a missionary meeting, it's always inspiring. I hope we can all be spiritually prepared for what he's going to be speaking to us about. And it's going to be fun going to Stake Conference because it's a 45 minute drive. I figured out that I'm pretty much in the country now. There's one more area south of us that's still a part of the "city zones" but past that it's country. If all country areas are this awesome, I really want to go country for real after this.

Another reason this area is so awesome is Shay and Ruth Preedy. I think I mentioned them last week but I've seen them twice since then. Shay has been a member his whole life, but was inactive for 10 years. He's been coming back since Ruth was baptised in April. He's getting the Melchizedek priesthood this week. And next April they're going to the temple. That's kinda the reason that I hope I stay here for 9 months, so I can be here for that. I love those guys so much already and I've only been in the area for like 11 days. It's been so good.

I've been studying the New Testament and reading it chronologically rather than from cover to cover and I've learned so much. Institute manuals are the best. And I read a quote this week by Spencer W. Kimball talking about missionary work. Basically what he was saying that if we continue at the pace we are going at, it is going to take us 10,000 years to baptise 1 billion people. Then we still have 3 billion to go, not counting all the people that are being born and dying in that 10,000 years. This work really is the most important work we ALL can be doing right now. If every member of the church brought a person or family into the church every year, the membership of the church would grow exponentially. EVERY MEMBER A MISSIONARY!

I attached a picture of my new companion, since I forgot to do that last week.

Love you all, keep up the amazing work
Elder Tanner

Anyone wanna Kwinana Banana?

Woohoo! I'm in a new area now, and it's a lot farther than a 5 minute bike ride down the road. My area is called Kwinana and it's about a 35 minute drive south of the city, so about 50 minutes away from my old area. I'm really loving it so far. My companion is Elder Jack and he's been out for about 3 months. He says that this area is pretty rough... but I guess he hasn't ever seen Girrawheen. He's a pretty good guy, bit on the nerdy side, but that's ok. He can do this dance called shuffling, I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's pretty cool to watch. He tried to teach me the other day, but I'm pretty hopeless.

It's a new experience for me being the senior companion. There's some parts of it that I don't really like, but then some parts that I do. The part that I do like is that since Elder Jack has only been out for 3 months he still really wants to work hard and so we do. The part that I'm still getting used to is the upped amount of responsibility I have. I have to make sure that we remember to do everything that we're supposed to, and on top of that I have to remember my new responsiblities like correlating with the district leader two nights a week. I almost forgot what it was like to work so hard. But it's good. The people that I've met in this area so far are really nice. In fact, I think I found a rival for my favorite family in the mission. Their names are Shay and Ruth Preedy. They're a couple years older than myself, with 2 young kids. We ate dinner at their house last night and had an awesome time. She was baptised 3 months ago and he has been less active for some time, but he's been coming back since she was baptised and he's getting the Melchezidek priesthood in 2 weeks at Stake Conference. So it's pretty exciting. We stayed at their house last night from 6:30 til about 8:45. After dinner we read a chapter from the Book of Mormon and discussed it and then we played some Phase 10. I don't think I've been able to talk to a family as well as we talked last night. We just talked about anything and everything. It was pretty cool. I'm excited to get to know them better and to be here for his priesthood ordination.

It's amazing how many less actives there are in this area. We don't have many investigators because the majority of the people that we work with are less active and part member families. But that's one thing that I hope to change in the time that I'm in this area. To have a lot of investigators as well as member families that we work with. I'm just happy to be working with anybody though. It's definitely a step up from my previous companion and area.

I have some amazing leaders in the area as well. My district leader is Elder Hampson, who was my Zone Leader in Girrawheen and an AP for the past 3 transfers. He goes home in September but he shows no signs of trunkyness. My other awesome leader is Elder Happel from Germany. He's one of my Zone Leaders. He's just the man, that's all there is to it. The zone leaders are in our ward which is something I'm used to by now, so I'll get to know him pretty well. But yesterday in our Missionary correlation meeting with our ward mission leader he was just so funny. It's nice to have a zone leader with a bit of a sense of humour. I hate those uptight ones that rarely joke around. I can tell I'm going to have some fun in this area. And I'm going to get some work done too. Double Whammy!

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes. My birthday wasn't anything spectacular, just spent the day packing and cleaning the flat getting ready to move. But I'm having my party today with Elder Jacobs and Elder Hampson who also have August birthdays so it should be a good one.

"And we give unto you the parable of the self-addressed envelopes. When the missionary departed into the far off land he gave a certain number of self-addressed stamped envelopes to his friends. Unto one he gave five, unto another he gave two, and unto the third he gave one. And while he was gone, he that was given the five envelopes wrote five letters, then in his zeal wrote five letters more. The same with him that had two envelopes; He wrote two letters and then two letters more. But he that was given the one self-addressed envelope became slothful and careless. And he lost the envelope, even that which he was given. And when the missionary came home he went unto his friends. And he that had written ten letters was warmly greeted. The same with him that had written four letters. But he that had written none at all was given nothing more than a fishy, wimp-like handshake"

Well I love you all. Hope you all have an amazing week.

Much love,
Elder Tanner

Can winter really be ending already?

So this week the temperature has been in the 70's and 80's all week. I'm really worried that winter is going to end before it ever begins. It's been a crappy winter even by Australian standards. It has hardly rained at all and they say the normal is that is rains all through June, July and some of August....WRONG! I'm sure this means that we're just in for a drier and hotter summer this upcoming summer. And judging by last summer, if that happens we're all going to die of heat exhaustion and dehydration lol.

This week has been alright. There's always room for improvement though. Well plus I've been sick since Wednesday, so it's been hard to do anything. We had to to cancel a couple of appointments because I was feeling so "under the weather" (ha, I don't think that expression really applies in Australia). I think it's the flu or something. I got a blessing yesterday after church, so hopefully this doesn't last too much longer.

There's been a lot of confusion with Trent this week too. Last week Bishop Morganti told us that he already was a member, but then we talked to his mom and she said that he was never baptised, he was just blessed as a baby, so i don't know if that puts your name in the records or not. But I guess it does. Anyways, we're going to have a talk with bishop and hopefully we can get both parties on the same page with this one.

Oh yeah, I guess the most important news this week is that I'm getting transferred! We found out on Saturday night that Elder Hunt and I are getting doubled out of the area and they're going to leave this area empty for a transfer. President Cahoon called me after we got off the phone with the Zone Leaders and told me that I'm going to be a senior companion next transfer as well so I'm pretty excited about that. I'm hoping that I can set a good example for whoever my junior companion is and that I'll be someone he can look up to in the mission as someone who does what's right. Oh, and hopefully I get transferred farther than 3kms down the road as well. I wanna see the country!

Well that's it for this week. I'm sure the countdown to OU kickoff has begun. Cheer for me.

Much love,
Elder Tanner

Noranda Week 11

This week was actually pretty awesome. Well some of it anyways. The Zone Leaders had a baptism yesterday after church which was really good. It was for a twenty something year old girl named Caitlin and her non-member mum came to support her as well. It was probably one of the best baptisms I've been to on my mission. It was well attended and the spirit was there in abundance. You could tell this girl knew the choice she was making and the things that go along with that choice. And she was really happy that her mom was there as well. Hopefully her mom gets baptised down the road as well.

Blair Main came to the baptism to support David who's a 17 year old kid from my old ward who did the baptising. It's actually really cool. David grew up with Caitlin but hadn't seen her for 10 years or something. Then they met again at institute a couple of weeks ago and remembered each other from when they were young and she asked him to baptise her. And he was only baptised 2 or 3 years ago as well. It's amazing how the Lord prepares things like that. David gets baptised, goes to institute, meets an old friend, and baptises her. It's straight out of a seminary video lol. But anyways, It was really good to see Blair again. He looked like a completely new person having been sealed to Sophie last week. He was just so happy and talking about their experiences almost the whole time. They've already been back twice since getting sealed, once on Wednesday evening and again on Saturday morning. I think he can really see the difference in his life that holding a temple recommend makes. He was talking about how busy this last week has been and that's why they went to the temple twice this week, so that they can see the blessings more abundantly in their lives, and I think they do. It was good to talk to him about some of the families in the ward too. He said the McGaugheys have come pretty much every week since I left, but Tayzah hasn't been baptised yet. I don't know what the hold up is, but Blair says he thinks it's coming up soon. He also said that the average attendance of Madeley ward is now around 150-160 people. When I first started going to that ward is was just around 70-80 per week. It's amazing what difference 8 months can make in a ward. I never thought I'd want to go back and visit that ward after being there for 6 months, but I want to go back and visit lol.

Our teaching with Trent and his cousin is going really well. We showed them the Finding Faith in Christ dvd last Monday and they loved it. I didn't know somebody as educated as them could know so little about Christ. They had so many questions just about his life, and the miracles and things like that. It was a good set up for The Gospel of Jesus Christ which is the next lesson we're going to teach them. Now that they know about his life, we're going to teach about his teachings (faith, baptism, repentance, the gift of the holy ghost, etc.). We would be teaching them tonight, but he has to work, so hopefully later in the week we can catch up with them.

I've had a lot of time for reading recently. I'm reading The Book of Mormon again, Preach My Gospel again, and the New Testament with an Institute manual. There's just an impossible amount of things to learn, it's crazy. But I love it. I love learning everything I can about the Gospel and the doctrine of Christ.

Not a whole lot else going on right now. I wish I could make this email longer, but there's really just not a lot to talk about. Hope you all have an amazing week.

Much love
Elder Tanner

72 degrees in the middle of winter... gotta love it.

So in the dead middle of winter, I was sweating while tracting the other day. It was so sunny and hot, it felt like a cool day in July in America. It's been continuing to rain off and on this week, but when it's not raining, it's hot. And I guess this is the driest winter they've had in awhile. It's kinda getting ridiculous.

Not a whole lot happened this week sadly. On Friday after District meeting we had a zone blitz in our area and got 4 new investigators out of it so that was exciting. For those that don't know what a zone blitz is, everybody in our zone came to do some tracting in our area for about 2 hours. So that's 6 companionships all tracting in the same neighborhood. I'm sure to anybody that was driving around we probably looked like the Mormon mafia or something, but then again maybe it made them want to ask what we were doing all walking around in suits on a sunny day. It was a good experience though. I got to be with one of my Zone Leaders, Elder Crawley, during this time and he is such a good missionary. Just talking with him while we tracted helped teach me a lot. He told me about his testimony of tracting. A lot of people think tracting is a waste of time, but he has baptised somebody that he found from tracting in every single one of his areas on his mission, with the one for his current area coming up this Saturday. I just think that's amazing. As useless as tracting feels sometimes, if you just get out there and do it, the results will come. Not only does it help you find people, but it helps your testimony of missionary work as it has with Elder Crawley. Just through his example, I know that if we will just open our mouths or go knock on a door, we can baptise those that the Lord has put in our path.

I'm trying to think of anything else exciting that happened this week. I'm really just ready to get transferred or get a new companion so I can get back to working as hard as I want to. It's true the scripture in Doctrine and Covenants, "If you have not the spirit, you shall not teach." That really applies to a missionary companionship as much as it does to any one person. I try to bring the spirit into our companionship, but Elder Hunt just doesn't have the fire to keep it burning in his heart. I've pretty much found myself becoming a leader when it comes to teaching, or deciding where to tract, or correlating with our Ward Mission Leader or Zone Leaders, or doing anything spiritual really. Maybe I'm just being prepared for what lies ahead of me, but I dunno. I just keep my head up and always remember to do the things I'm supposed to, (pray, scripture study, plan), so I don't lose the spirit too.

Sophie and Blair Main got sealed this past weekend. I wasn't able to go, only their current missionaries and the ones who baptised Blair were allowed to go. And at first not even their current missionaries were going to be able to go. But I talked to Sister Berryman last night and she went and she said that they were just glowing when they came out of that temple. I'm so happy for them, and wish I could've been there, but I'm happy that they know what's important in this life and hope they make temple attendance a part of their daily lives, as we all should. I'm probably going to see if I can get permission to call out of my area to talk to them and congratulate them and see how they feel. I was so happy when I found out that they had gone.

Lets see, not much going on this week. We are going city contacting on Wednesday evening which is always a good experience. Hopefully I won't be too tired from the massive feed we always get on Wednesday afternoon from Brother Tupea. I've never been fed so well as I do at his house. One of the good things about Polynesians, they sure do know how to eat!

I love you all. Always stay close to the Gospel. Nothing can make you happier in this life.

Love,
Elder Tanner