Week 64

Dear Family:

What a week what a week. Sometimes you go out and work your tail off and talk to heaps of people and smash yourself, and you can't see much happening from it. It's true that often things are happening under the surface that i'm not able to see, haha but that doesn't always make me feel better when totaling up our numbers sunday night!

We were able to meet with jimmy this week and he took us out to hot pot! there's this really nice sichuan restaurant in downtown canberra that he took us to and he wants to take us again this friday in case i get transferred. He is the man. Literally the man. He's got his final exams for this semester coming up and he still has to read heaps of stuff and study, but he's come to church every week and has been reading the book of mormon and not just reading, but studying it. This just feels like the way missionary work is supposed to be. We were talking to him this week and he told us that he is a part of the Communist Party back in china so pretty much baptism is off the table for at least 6 months. He told us that it takes 6 months to resign from it and he's going to resign until the party's policy changes and members can have a religious belief. He will be in australia until next July so maybe there's a chance i can be here for his baptism. But if not, that's okay. Because he's the man! haha

Wilma came to church again this week and she brought a friend! Her name is amber. She is from Henan Province and is studying at ANU. at the end of sacrament meeting one of the members who is a returned missionary from taiwan was asked to give the closing prayer and he gave it in Chinese! haha it made all the Chinese investigators really happy. I asked Amber how she felt after the meeting and she said that she couldn't understand much because she's only been in Australia about a month but she said she felt peaceful and she really liked it. Haha we asked  if we could meet up during the week to explain a little bit more, but she has too many assignments and is too busy. Hopefully we can get her to sit in when we go to teach wilma. Wilma is doing pretty good.

We met with yang Bai on wednesday and it was good. She's not at the point now where she's ready to start progressing, but i think eventually she will. She's so nice and she's been helping me with my chinese. haha speaking of which, elder Bowcut and i decided that both our chinese is not very good, and his is better than mine. so we have been waking up at 5:30 to do an extra hour of language study. It's been good. we smash through about 50 words every morning and we still have our regular hour of study! hahaha we'll see how long we can keep it up.

We did a lot of finding this week, and didn't come up with much. One girl said it was okay for us to come back, but i think it was more just a combination of her being nice and elder Katene with the smooth voice.... hahaha no answer when we went back.... We found a part-member family that we're hoping to work with more, but we were only able to visit with them really quickly because they were on their way out. So i guess i'll keep you posted on that. We dropped by a former that we are going to help move this weekend and she explained to us this miracle story of how she met the missionaries but because of a few things she hasn't been baptized. She told us that in the bible, john the beloved was mis-interpreted and was really meant to be Mary magdelene, the beloved companion (wife) of Jesus. I guess you learn something new every day. She gave us the gospel of mary to borrow and read through so we'll see how that goes! :)

Other than that, almost nobody was home this week. It was rough going. But we had a good time through it all. Hope you all have a great week! Love you very much! Miss you! Church is true. Jesus is our savior. not sure where mary fits into it all, but that's not what's important:)

-Elder Tingey