New Companion!

Hi everyone! So another transfer happened! I'm still in Windaroo, but my new companion is Elder Apable! He's from the Philipines and goes home in 1.5 transfers, so I'll probably be "killing him" as they say. I miss my old companion, Elder Tiaihau, but I'm excited to get to know this one and learn from him since he's been on the mission for so long!

Anyways, this week has had it's ups and downs. The last email I sent talked about Morris, a former investigator who we re-established contact with again. There's a long story behind it, but basically he dropped us officially now, I think his wife has a lot to do with it since he usually really enjoys our visits. The 9 year old boy that I talked about in the last email told his parents he wants to be baptized sooner, so they're planning on baptizing him in the next few weeks! Hopefully everything works out for that!

Other than that we've just been doing a lot of lawn mowing this week, door knocking, and preparing for the end of the transfer (which means cleaning and planning). Also, we took the car in to get serviced and had to spend 5 hours just waiting for it to finish... so that took out a chunk of our work time but I can't complain too much, at least we have a car.

Thank you all for your love and support!

Elder Ho

Service

So this past week was filled with a lot of service opportunities! First, we had a district service and we spent at least 4 hours trying to dig out this massive stump from an investigators yard.Then on wednesday, we did around another 4 hours of yard work for a less active woman, from digging holes, weeding, cutting trees, and spreading dirt and mulch. She ended up coming to church on Sunday, which was awesome! Then, we ran into someone who needed help weeding their garden, so we spent around 2 hours doing that on Saturday! As a missionary, service is probably one of the funnest things we get to do, so it made our week pretty interesting and fun!

We were also able to set a baptismal date this week, which is pretty exciting. It's for a 9 year old boy. His family is active, but he wasn't baptized because he's a little slower mentally and wasn't ready to be baptized at 8. His parents have been having us teach him all the lessons, which has been pretty hard since he's a young energetic kid and he had the shortest attention span I've ever seen. So we have to be pretty creative with our lessons, but its fun. We saw the family this week though, and we planned for him to be baptized on the 1st of May, although that date could change depending on him and his brothers, who are going to be getting baptized soon too.

Another thing that we're excited about is one of our old investigators, Morris. We haven't been able to get in contact with him for a whole transfer and we were worried that we would have to drop him. So yesterday, my companion felt the impression to see him one final time, and he ended up answering the door. We're not sure why he wasn't home when we tried visiting him and why it was difficult to contact him, but we're excited to hopefully start teaching him again.

Anyways, I guess I'll share a little message about charity. We all know that charity is "the pure love of Christ", but as I was studying it recently, I came across an interesting chapter in the bible, I believe it's 1 Corinthians chapter 13. It talks about the importance of charity; without it, miracles, prophecies, wisdom, service, pretty much everything, is pointless. In the least verse it says that among faith, hope, and charity, charity is of the greatest importance. When I thought about it, it's true. We can serve others, but if we're doing it for the wrong reasons and not out of love, it's in vain. As missionaries, we can work hard, but if we're just doing it for the numbers or to brag to others, it's in vain. We can even perform miracles and prophecy about things, but if it's for the wrong things like fame, then it's all in vain. But when we do everything in love, because we love others and we love the Lord, then there is a real reason and purpose for why we do it. 

Thanks everyone for all your love and support!

Elder Ho

Dinner with the mission president:

District service:

The Heat Wave

So another week has passed by, and I feel like we're in the refiner's fire... literally. We got hit by a heat wave over the weekend, and it's been crazy hot. Things have been good though.

First, we got to have dinner with President McSwain, our mission president. Our zone had hit our month's goal of 5 baptisms, and when that happens we get a zone p-day and a dinner with the President. It was really, fun, we had hamburgers and played a game (sisters and the President and his wife versus the Elders). It was fun being able to spend time with the President and Zone in a more casual way and get to know all of them better.

We also got to help a member build a retaining wall in his front yard, and helped him with spreading the concrete, and laying the bricks. It's not done yet but the hardest part is over. There was a lot of adjusting and making sure the bricks were perfectly level and aligned, but in the end it looked pretty good.

We also got to have tradeoffs with the zone leaders, and I was with Elder Putong, a Filipino. I was able to learn a lot from him, but it was also pretty funny, he's going home soon and he's a bit trunky (excited to go home).

Anyways, thank you all for your love and support!

Love,

Elder Ho

So things are starting to pick up a bit here in the windaroo area in Australia! First, we have finally found some new investigators! The first one said we could come back, just give her a text and she'll cook something up for us too! The second one is an older lady who's taking care of her grandkids and said she hasn't seen missionaries in a while and is looking forward to us being able to see her again (she used to be an investigator around a year ago, but lost contact with the missionaries). We were also able to provide service for one of our member's friend/neighbor. She is German and doesn't speak very much english, so we got permission from our leaders to have have tradeoffs with another companionship who had an Elder from Germany, and it went really awesome!

Anyways, we also did some service for a senior missionary who needed help moving a refrigerator out of a missionary couple's flat that wasn't being used anymore. Since they were getting rid of everything in the flat, they let us take whatever we needed, and now we have a cool little desk fan, some speakers to rock out to Mormon Tab' to, an extra chair, and an entire shelf full of copies of the Book of Mormon in different languages.

That's about all the exciting stuff that happened this week, but we're having a dinner with our Mission President tonight so I'll let you all know how that goes next monday.

Thank you everyone for your love and support! 

Elder Ho