"A Mission Without Miracles is not a Mission at all." - Elder Anderson
We get transfer news tonight. We are still together, Elder Wilson and I. We are working our butts off. I am all good to speak on Sunday still. I have been planning the homecoming speech since day one. Jokes. :) I will probably have enough time to prepare hopefully, you know with that short flight ;), but I am going to try and get as much sleep as I can on the flight. If it comes down to it I can probably wing it - thats pretty much what I have done my whole mission. I was happy that Sis Jackson emailed you. I was just on Trade Offs with the Assistants. It was fun to go back to the North Shore for the day. I think Elder Wilson will finish me off in the mission. We don't know for sure yet. Congrats to Nik - I will look forward to meeting him. It is going to be a very busy weekend. The cabin it seems is a central focus in our lives - I don't think I realized how big of a deal it was until I came out on the mission but it seems that it one of the regular email topics. It is such a great place.
This week:
Yes it has been a busy week. We have mostly just been working in our Favona area however. We have had some real progress with the people we are teaching. We thought we would spend some time traveling around the mission with permission to proselyte anywhere but we still just stuck in our small ward boundary in South Auckland. We didn't really have time to drive places. There is plenty of work in our small area. Plus the Tongan and Niuean Ward didn't really have a lot going on with them. The missionaries were struggling in those areas and that always makes it hard for the work to progress. So we ended up mostly working in good old Favona Ward.
Something I really wanted to share is a cool experience we had with Sarah. We were finally able to catch up with her and have a lesson this week. We asked her what had caused her to change her mind about baptism and text us. Sarah told us that sometime after we taught the Plan of Salvation lesson she had an emotional breakdown during the following days. She fell back into old sins, life didn't seem to be going well and one day it just all seemed to go wrong. She was alone in her car and she was pretty much at her lowest point and she started to curse our Heavenly Father - with everything she now knew about Him it all just seemed unfair. Remember that prior to our lessons Sarah didn't even believe in God as her father, she didn't believe really in much of anything but since then she has made some big changes in her life. She was very upset, and she swears enough out of habit as it is, but she was angry and she said some terrible things to God. After she had calmed down she didn't feel like He was mad at her like she thought He would be. She said that she felt that He loved her. She was surprised. How could He still love her? It was almost as if she wanted Him to smite her or something. Then if that wasn't amazing enough, when she had pulled herself together she stepped out of her car and on the ground right outside her car was a missionary badge. She couldn't believe it. She said she new it was a sign and she shortly texted us after that experience to tell us that she wanted to be baptized. I know that Heavenly Father is very involved in this work, and in the lives of each one of His children. It was just all to perfect to be a coincidence. I am grateful that He is a God of miracles.
After she told us that we picked a day for her to be baptized in the month of October. We then finally got to teach her the Full Restoration lesson. When we invited her to pray about the Book of Mormon at the end she started looking at us as iff we were dumb. Then she said. "Why do you think I want to be baptized. I already know the Book of Mormon is true." We replied, "You prayed about it right?," and she said "Of course I did, isn't that what I was supposed to do." She told us that she did it ages ago and we asked why she didn't tell us earlier, apparently she didn't realize how important it was haha. Didn't think that was that big of a deal until we had taught the Restoration. It has been so fun to teach her. She is just so cool and she is crack up. She just needs to come to church and get to know more of the members. Then I think that everything else will be fine.
That's what I wanted to share, hopefully you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed seeing it happen and then getting to put it into words today.
Love
Elder Summers