So this has been an amazing week! We have seen heaps of miracles and have been giving it our all! I think Elder Parkinson is ready for a break today though haha. He is in bed and snoring by 9:20ish as soon as we finish planning! He is awesome though. He will be a great missionary even though he is stuck with me haha.
So one thing that has been hard and will be hard this month is our kilometers have been cut down..... we only have 2500 now. And we have to drive up to grafton which is like 600 round trip and we have to go to coffs 2 or 3 times which is a 400 round trip and we gotta go down to taree like 2 or 3 times and it is a 200 round trip! So we arent left with much to drive in our area! but we are making it work! Come what may and love it.
But an update on the aboriginl kids! They are awesome! I love them so much. We go over there at least 2 times a week and teach them a little at a time. This week we talked about Jesus Christ and repentance. We also had them start reading the Book of Mormon. They are loving learning about God. I made up this game where they jump of the trampoline and i catch them and throw them back on and it is all they want to do after the lesson now haha. Needless to say I get a good workout by the end of it. Something cool is that they live by a horse racing track and so everyones backyard is connected into one big one and the kids in the neighborhood have started coming over when we are there and we play with them and teach them about Jesus Christ! I love them all so much. We were sitting on the tramp talking and one of them asked if I was ever gonna go away and I said I would have to eventually and they all said they wouldnt let me go and that I could come stay with them haha. I will have to run that one by my mission president first I think!
We found heaps of new investigators this week! We just have gone around and knocked every door and contacted people from the past and just everything we could do. The Lord blessed us with success! I remember we were looking for one former investigator and we knocked on her door and it was some other person. So we were like oh ok bad address and tried talking to the man but he wasnt interested. So we were walking back towards our car and we saw a rabbit so of course we had to stop and look at it. And elder parkinson wanted to take a picture of it so while he was doing that I was looking around and I saw this lady in her yard with her daughter. I pointed her out to elder parkinson and he felt like we should go talk to her too. So we went over and said hi and it turned out that she was the one we had been looking for! The missionarys had written her address wrong before. She said she had been wanting to see the missionarys again but hadn't been able to contact us. We are going back tomorrow to teach her!
We have an investigator who is 12 who lives way out in Comboyne, which is like over an hour drive away up in the mountains, that we hadnt been able to see in a long time. And we couldnt go see him because our kilometers got cut and it was too far. But a member was able to drive us out and we had an awesome lesson with him. We taught him the restoration and he loved it. He has been reading the Book of Mormon heaps and he said that the reason he loved it so much is because he didnt really know about Jesus Christ before but now he knows him super good. He wants to be baptized and accepted the invitation to be baptized on the 31 of this month! and we are doing it in the river! its gonna be rad.
Another cool experience we had was with another investigator family. They have been feeding missionaries for years and love us, but they havent taken the lessons in ages and have been kinda against hearing them. They aren't completely sure about if they believe or not. So one night me and elder parkinson went over there and we were talking and eating dinner and I said "Hey, elder parkinson is new and I am supposed to help him learn how to teach the lessons. Could we practice by teaching you?" And they were totally open to it. I felt kinda like ammon when he was trying to teaching king lamoni and said "and thus he was caught with guile" It's righteous guile though haha. So we went back a few days later and taught them the restoration and the Spirit was so strong. It is a family and they have 2 kids-a daughter who is 12 and a little boy who is 3. I love that kid haha he is crack up! But we began teaching them and what we taught was a lot different than what we had planned. I guess that is how the Spirit works though. We knew deep down there were some hidden concerns and the Spirit was able to whisper to us what they were. We used scriptures, shared personal experiences, and bore our testimony. Every question they had, the answer was impressed onto at least one of our minds and we were lead on how to answer it. By the end we were all crying. Well at least I was haha. But the Spirit was just so strong. They couldnt deny it. The knew it was true. At the end I felt prompted to ask the mother to say the prayer even though I knew she had said she would never pray to God. She looked at me and said she would. She said the most sweet prayer. She prayed for the first time in public, and for the second time in her life. She prayed for her family and that she could know the truth of what we shared. We left them with some Books of Mormon and commited them to read alma chapter 32. I promised them they would receive an answer if they would read and pray. I know they will.
Yesterday we went over to a recent converts home whose husband is investigating right now. We we hadn't planned to go there but felt we needed to stop by. So we pulled over and walked up the stairs to their home and when we got to the top we saw them both on their porch and the wife was crying. We started talking to her and found that she has suffered from depression her whole life. She had physical pain from a injury years ago and just has had endless depression. We sat down with her and I pulled out the scriptures and we read scripture after scripture. The ones to turn to just kept popping into my mind. After, we felt impressed to ask her if she wanted a blessing. She said she did. So we anointed her head and I gave the blessing. I think i have said this before but that is one of my favorite things to do. To feel God's will and love for each person I am able to lay my hands upon to give a blessing. As I gave the blessing she began to cry. Afterwards as we continued to talk I cried with her. I just have so much love for these people. I know God loves them and he wants them back.
I love my mission. It is the best experience I have ever had. I love bringing God's children closer to Him and showing them the path to the iron rod. I love the people we serve. They are amazing. I know this work is true.
I love you all!
Elder White
