State of Origin

First of all, this past thursday, on July 13, I officially hit my year mark! And what was cool about it was that I got to go on tradeoffs... with Elder Hymas! We entered the MTC together just within a few hours or even minutes of each other, lived in the same MTC room, flew on the same plane here, and now celebrated our year mark together! Not trying to sound trunky, we were just talking about what a cool day it was during tradeoffs. 

What happened this week? Well we taught a bit, door knocked a bit, street contacted at night a bit, and had dinners with members just about every night, so it's been a pretty good but normal week. On Tuesday we had a zone conference, where multiple zones gathered together to receive trainings from our President and a few others, and that's where I found my first Hawaiian! Elder and Sister Graham are the pacific mental health missionaries (something like that), and Sister Graham was born and raised in Hawaii! She even graduated from the same Highschool! She acted like a local Hawaiian too, which was kinda funny to see because I haven't seen that in a whole year. It was nice being able to talk to her a bit after the conference. 

Another cool thing was being able to talk to our zone leader's investigator (who was just baptized this past saturday) on tradeoffs. It was really cool, basically he prayed and read the Book of Mormon to find out if it was true, and his answer ended up being him realizing he needed to serve a mission. So when I talked to him, which was before his baptism, he was already talking about where he wanted to serve and how excited he was, which I thought was really awesome!

And if your wondering what the title is all about, for all you Americans out there the State of Origin is a huge rugby competition between (I think this is right) pretty much the Northern and the Southern Part of Australia... hopefully I'm not teaching false doctrine here. It's New South Wales vs Queensland. It's huge over here, and they have 3 games between the two teams, it's kinda like the superbowl in America, when you talk about popularity. And Queensland won! They play on Wednesday nights, and this past Wednesday was the final game, so it was fun being able to go street contacting that night and hearing all the cheering and screaming coming from some of the houses. Also, I had to make sure I didn't wear a blue tie, since that's the New South Wales team...

And fun fact! Did you know that it's illegal to have a rabbit in the state of Queensland? And in all of Australia you can't have... I believe it's a hamster. And if you do get caught you can get a bigger fine that you would get if you got caught growing weed. I think the best part is that if you take a rabbit to the vet, they'll call it something like a "long eared guinea pig" or something like that, so that you won't get in trouble after they treat it.

Well, back on the missionary work side of things, while I was celebrating my year mark on tradeoffs, my companion and the other zone leader set a baptismal date for August 5th with one of our investigators! It's exciting, but it means that we'll have A LOT of work ahead of us. 

And for the spiritual message for today... I'll talk about obedience. Obedience is the first law in heaven, and it is only through obedience that we can be blessed. One of the reasons Heavenly Father has given us commandments is so that he can bless us! One thing that was mentioned in zone conference was that obedience shouldn't just be a chore or duty, but a quest! And when you think about it, at the end of quests are great rewards, so the result of obedience yields many rewards, and ultimately, exaltation. 

Thanks everyone for your love and support!

Elder Ho