January 26, 2015 - 6 Months to Go!!!

Elders headed into the Mall in Queenstown

My weekly report for you :) :

I'm officially not a sister missionary anymore! Yesterday I hit 18 months on mission Its crazy. It feels like I’ve been out forever...ha ha. I have to burn my pants tonight!

This week, was soooo flipping hot! I was sweating all week long. But we had a pretty good week! Our districts stats this week were better than they have ever been, between the two of us we taught 30 member present lessons! Elder Ratema and I taught 28 lessons this week, and Ilinge had 26! Pretty good, and this week seems like it went fast...not as fast as last week (which flew by for me), but still fast.

We've been waking up early every other day to go and play basketball with the zone leaders at the Queenstown chapel. That has been really good. Makes sure everyone is up and its’ a better way to get some exercise! Nice and cooler in the mornings so it’s the best time :) And plus now  I’ve got my 6 months to sexy so  I need those mornings ;) ha ha.

Well I had a few cool experiences this week with that whole "testing the promises" thing. We were working on Tuesday with 2 fellowshippers, a young man named Sihle, and Bonga.  Well we had a few appts. drop in a row, and we had about 45 minutes until our next appt. so we decided to split up, me and Sihle would go down one street, and they would go down another, and we set the goal that collectively we would teach at least one discussion. Well we prayed and then went to work. Sihle and I walked, and we decided we weren’t feeling the first house cause it was just full of grannys, so we went to the second, knocked, the guy let us in, he had sat with missionaries before and disagreed with the apostasy, but wondered why we were called "mormons". We opened with a prayer and explained the Book of Mormon to him a bit. He argued lots (like prophets) but we taught a discussion and at the end he was getting pretty argumental and I bore testimony pretty Holland style, and he was silenced, and we closed with a prayer and left. Hahaha. Kinda cool, Sihle said it was powerful. Then we met another guy who as we talked with him said he didn’t believe in life after death. I told him about how he could see his children after he died and he was just like "you believe that?" super sincerely, and we explained the plan of salvation, and taught him yesterday, it was pretty cool!

Friday I was on exchanges with Elder Mariner in Ilinge. Ilinge had been struggling, and for some reason they weren’t having success doing the "testing" thing...they would make goals and never achieve them. Well I wanted to go there and boost morale. So we had a district meeting on it that morning that kinda got everyone excited, and then Elder Mariner and I went out to Ilinge! We had a few set appts. But had about 2 1/2 hours of free time, so we set the goal that we would have 2 discussions and find an unrelated return appt! Well the first house we went to, return appt. Then 5 minutes later, we taught a discussion to a guy about the Book of Mormon! After that morale was high and we went to our set  appts, and then ended up teaching 3 other unplanned discussions! So we made our goal for sure! I was super happy, cause I had been hyping up the exchange all week with Mariner to get him excited about having success and it worked again! I was super happy, and I think it boosted faith in all of us, and we ended up having the best week we have had in terms of lessons taught!

Sunday was a normal day, church (not a huge turnout...we had more less actives come than investigators but I guess it’s all the same) and then we taught a good amount of lessons afterwards! It was a pretty good one.

This is the last week of the mega transfer! I'm excited to move into next transfer, but it should be another good week!