The Tri-panionship is definitely still balanced. The work is going great. We are having a hard time finding new people to teach but we are having a lot of work with the people we are teaching. The whole family came to church this week, a lot of other stuff happened with them as well. (Refer to the next section titled This Week:) The weather here is perfect right now. It is always partly cloudy with a slight breeze and an occasional light sprinkle of rain. If it stayed like this, I would be happy all the time. During the days we are having fun. It is still really slow but we are trying and we found a new family to work with that is home during the day so that is good. I find that during each day it is slow, just like for you Dad, but the weeks are flying by. It is so cool that Alexis got baptized! That it's cool too that you got to have lunch with one of the piano guys! ;) Josh Ogden is probably so jealous. Church meetings definitely counts - I decided that because there are two famous people that I know in our ward. One is Charlie Pome'e, a singer from Three Houses Down, and a rugby league player who plays for the Warriors. His name is Dom. That is all I know about him but he is pretty cool. So yeah my "My brush with Greatness" list is increasing. Just another blessing from living the gospel I guess.
This Week:
This week was pretty crazy - well, at least Saturday was. On Tuesday, Lani's mom told us that they were moving to Australia, this obviously wrecked us. Lani the little girl that we have been teaching. We were pretty disappointed. The mum did tell us that she still wanted to have Lani baptized. She also said that they were moving to her aunt's house who is a member AND a return missionary too. After we realized this we told her that we would have to ask our mission president if we could baptize her even though she was moving. We weren't able to get a hold of President Balli until Thursday, he ended up just telling us that we should pray and then we could make the decision. So we prayed and we felt good about doing it. On Friday evening we went over to Lani's and told her mum that we were going to do it. We didn't have anything scheduled or done to be ready so Saturday was insanely crazy. In one day we taught Lani 2 lessons along with her little brother James who is 8 and arranged baptismal interviews for them - the zone leaders with Lani and a member of the bishopric with James because he is technically a primary baptism not a convert baptism. We organized the program, including conductor, presiding bishopric member, assigning speakers, a musical number, and even asking someone in the Relief Society to provide light refreshments. We had to fill up the font (which takes 1 hour) and find baptismal clothing for both of them. This would have been 10 times easier but it ended up being the Stake Temple Day here, so our active ward members met at the chapel early and they all loaded up on a bus and drove down to Hamilton. They didn't get back until like 5 and the baptism started at 6. Also not to mention we had 5 other scheduled lessons throughout the day. I don't know how we did it but we made it. It was probably one of my busiest days on the mission so far.
I was pretty nervous about baptizing Lani, It felt weird to baptize her and then have her just leave but her parents moved their plane tickets to Thursday instead so they could come to church and so that Lani and James could be confirmed in Sacrament meeting. So they are still here and I am excited to at least have a few more lessons with them. I know it is pretty selfish of me but I really don't want them to leave. I love teaching them and of course my primary training is still helping.
I am loving the work, I am loving a trio and the work is continuing to hasten.
Love,
Elder Summers