Week 23

Nimen Hao!

Okay now i know you are all dying to hear about transfers, but i will get to that later. I want to start with a sweet as miracle we had this week. We were going around visiting people on Tuesday and At one point our plans fell through, and then our backup plan fell through. and even our backup to the backup fell through and i'm pretty sure if we had had one more backup plan it would've fallen through also. But we didnt' really know what to do so we decided to call one of the people on our former investigators list. Her name is Julie. It's always dodgy to do former investigator work because sometimes they are nice to you and want to talk to you and sometimes there is a reason they stopped investigating the church and they want nothing to do with you. But we decided to call. She answered the phone and as soon as we said this is the missionaries she said, "I haven't seen you in a while! Come over right now!" I told her she hadn't seen us before ever because we are new to the area but we will be over soon. When we got there she invited us in. (her father lives with her so we were all goods) we talked about her history with the missionaries and she invited us back for dinner tonight so we are praying she picks us back up and starts progressing.

This week we went on trade-offs with the zone leaders. I was with Elder Phillips, from New Zealand, and elder Cheng went with Elder Whiting. I decided i wanted to have an experienced missionary show me how to tract and stuff because my trainer never really showed me and i've been trying to figure it out on my own and it's not really working, hahah. SO we went to this pretty wealthy area and started knocking. I kindof thought we wouldn't have any success, but it ended up being awesome! It's amazing how much more comfortable i feel on a doorstep when i'm not the senior companion. haha but i will say that tracting in australia is very unique. Not many other places in the world can you knock on 10 doors and talk to people from 10 different countries. We met a muslim man from south Africa, an aussie, a chilean, a samoan and tongan, a man from switzerland, a woman from hong kong (cantonese. i was heartbroken) its just amazing how much diversity there is.

Tomorrow the new misisonaries come in and I'm pretty sure elder Randle got his visa so he should be arriving with them! One of the elders in my district is training, i think, so there is a chance he could be in my district! that would be so flippin awesome. But that brings me to transfers. Elder Grant got transferred to Canberra, Elder Fiu (our district leader and probably my best friend for the past 12 weeks) is now a zone leader in Ingleburn which is not very far away at all! Elder whiting went up to fairfield i think. Not sure. Elder grant's replacement is Elder Peleuale from Samoa. Elder Fiu didn't get replaced because he was in a tri-panionship and elder whiting was replaced by elder Katene from New Zealand. Our district got switched up so we aren't with campbeltown 1st anymore. It's camden(4) Macarthur(6) and Campbeltown 3rd the samoan ward(2) I got to go to transfer meeting because i had the car and it was so awesome. It made me want to work harder, hearing all the departing misionaries bear their testimonies. But then after it was done, the APs handed out the travel plans for how we were getting back to our areas and each zone had a travel leader, and seeing as i was the only one that went to transfer meeting and didnt get transferred from our zone, guess who was the travel leader for the macarthur zone? That's right. I had to make sure all 9 of us got back to our areas and into our flats safely. On the paper the APs wrote "we're counting on you, elder Tingey. Don't fail us." hahaha it was stressful, but we all made it back okay. The new sisters are hectic. (that means cool in Australia, by the way) Sister Vos and sister pea and sister Perez. The elders are just as cool. Elder peleuale, elder katene, elder coats, and elder something that i can't remember how to spell. He's samoan. Hahaha okay i'll wrap this long as letter up, but i probably should mention that i got a call from president lew on saturday and he asked me to serve as District Leader. Ya, i'm just a bit overwhelmed right now but all will be well. Hahaha good luck to me. and to our district. This should be an exciting 6 weeks.

Love you all. God lives, Jesus is the CHrist, God has a prophet on the Earth today, and that is why we can change the world. I'm just happy to be a part of it. Til next week!

-Elder Tingey