Week 75

Right now we are down in Cowra for trade-offs. we drove down last night and we'll be here until wednesday morning. There's only two computers and we have six missionaries that have to email so i'll have to be quick today. 

This past week was really good. We had a great lesson with our friend Nigel on monday. We always get to the really fundamental principles of the gospel so it's helped me be able to simplify my knowledge and understanding of the gospel. He's the man. 

We had zone conference with the area president on thursday and it was awesome. His name is elder Pearson and he was born and grew up in Holladay! not sure if we know his family or not but yous should find out... but he was incredible. It was the most revelatory zone conference of my mission. The whole time was just revelation station! It was kindof a rebuking conference but i think we all needed to hear it. Probably good preparation for when elder bednar comes... haha honestly though, i'm way excited for that. 

This past week i've felt especially close to our Savior and our family. i love you all and want you to know how much i love serving christ. Miss you all like crazy but august will come soon enough so i'm focusing on right now. K i have to go. next week will be a better email. love you heaps!

-Elder Tingey

Pictures!

This is our district. We're in random order but the back is me, then elder smith, then elder stewart, then elder Fitzner from canada then the sisters from left to right is sister Tauti from american Samoa, then sister Chaipinet from Thailand, sister Paongo from New Zealand, sister Bretzing from Virginia, then sister Te Maari from New Zealand. It was meant to be a football pic so we all look way intimidating. haha

Me opening up my presents on Christmas morning! Can you tell I just woke up?!

The most exclusive club in the mission. Mandarin speakers Unite! 

Sister Imamori, sister Dong, and sister Huang. The coolest. 

Merry Christmas in Australia! All we can do is dream of a white christmas...

Week 74

Happy New Year everyone! 

Hope you did something really fun. We did. We got permission to go down to bathurst new years eve and the senior couple down there threw a party for all the missionaries in the zone. it was way fun. and we slept over and in the morning we had district meeting. and guess what i trained on.... that's right, GOALS. haha it was great. hope you all set some great new years resolutions. Remember dad's advice to be a square! haha love it. It was a bit annoying, though because they sprang the DTM on us like two days before so i had to rush the preparation and i think the execution suffered because of it... hahah no it was great. they had to push it up because next week we have a zone conference. 

President Pearson (area president) is touring our mission so everyone is having a conference. but it messed everything up so ZTM is now pushed back a week which means that dtm wouldn't have happened this month so they did it the first week instead. Haha don't worry, totally not bitter about it. But something cool, we were talking to the senior couple, their names are elder and sister Hill and they're pretty much our parents out here. they're awesome. but we were talking to them and sister hill let slip that we have another apostle coming! so we kept bothering her about it and she told us that it's Elder Bednar! I'm so excited. He's coming at the end of February! So there's something to look forward to! 

We had a cool miracle this week! We decided to go do some finding up in Kandos. It's a town that's like 45 min drive away from mudgee. So we drove up there and walked around for a few hours trying to find some investigators. We werent having much luck, but we finally were walking past this house where a guy was washing his car out front and his daughter saw us and yelled out to us and started just talking to us! haha it was awesome! so we talked to her for a bit and then started talking to her dad. Usually when we try to transition from small talk to the gospel is when people shut off and tell us to go away but this guy was totally cool with it! so we sat there and talked to him about our views on Jesus and he seemed pretty keen so we gave him a plan of salvation pamphlet and he told us we can come back whenever we want! He's your stereotypical aussie where a good percentage of his vocabulary is the F word, but he's a good guy and his daughter is adorable. But it was a good testament to me that God is willing to help us, but sometimes we have to be like the brother of Jared and take some initiative. Rocks don't melt themselves! haha 

Hope you all have a great week! Love you all so much! miss you like crazy, and i can't wait for mothers' day to talk to you all again. The church is true! The book is blue! 

love,

Elder Tingey

Week 73

Alright another great week here in Australia! 

It was so good to talk to all of you on friday. it looks like you are doing great. weird how much has changed since 16 months ago. hopefully i still fit in in august! haha Thank you for your love and support. it honestly means the world to me. Love you guys so much! and can't wait for mother's day! i'll almost be home by then.... haha let's not think about that. 

Not much has happened since i talked to you on friday. But we did have a part member family come to church! it was awesome. They live like 45 min out of mudgee and have two little kids so it was a big sacrifice for them. The wife is the member. debbie and gary are their names. They are really cool. we've been out to their house a couple times and they have horses and sheep and ponies and cows and chickens. it was pretty sweet. It's kindof weird because there's like heaps of ponies here. i don't know exactly why because they don't seem to serve much of a purpose, but there's tons of them. haha 

I guess i didn't tell you about mission conference so i'll tell you about that. We slept over in bathurst on sunday night because it's a bit closer and the whole zone slept there (well, all the elders, at least) and then we got up early and drove down to sydney. we had to leave at 6:00 and we got there at about 9:30. Somehow we missed the traffic. it was a christmas miracle! haha but we socialized for a while until they called us into the chapel for the program. Each zone performed a musical number and they had a bunch of speakers. one of them was Elder Randle! haha he's the man. Smashed it on the talk. Our zone did "once in royal david's city" to the tune of come thou fount. Yeah, it was awesome. and yes, it was my idea. but of course the zone leaders got credit for it.... hahah all good. But the program was really good. Spiritually uplifting and motivating. Then we had lunch, which was really good. It is always good food here in the ASSM. (We say A double S M haha) We set up a "chinese only table" haha it was great. all the mandarin speakers and the guys from mainland and taiwan. the hong kong-ers were at a different table. We didn't want none of that 广东话。(cantonese) haha It was way fun, though. i love hanging out with those guys. 

Elder Ward is training an elder from Beijing, and get this, they're in the cantonese branch! hahaha what the heck?? neither of them speak cantonese but apparently they have people translating everything into mandarin and most of their investigators are from mainland china. haha Shucks, they're so lucky. And the cantonese branch boundaries go up into the north mission so they get to go up into sydney! they said their branch mission leader lives like way close to the harbor bridge.... dang maybe i will put in a dying wish to president back... i'm hoping my next area is my last. i don't want to have any more two transfer areas. 

Elder Hixson gave me a bottle of Lao Gan Ma which made me extremely happy. Im convinced that is what makes my chinese improve. so hopefully if i keep eating that i will be able to hold onto some chinese. hahaha but then after lunch we took down the tables and watched Saratov Approach. I really loved it. haha we were laughing because i pointed out that us watching that is like watching the Titanic while you're on a cruise. hahaha but it was still good. Had to choke back some tears there at the end. And then after that we just socialized and played some games that they set up for a couple hours and then went home. We got permission to stop at one of the shops in Liverpool and grabbed some Koko Samoa and mangos. These mangoes are like the size of your head. haha just kidding, but they are huge. and soooo good. but they don't make it up to mudgee so we needed some. And koko samoa is just cocoa, but it's way good. and it also doesnt' make it up to mudgee. You should try to find out if you can get it in salt lake because if you can't, then i'm bringing home a suitcase full of it. haha but really, ask some islanders. 

But that was our mission conference. And while we ate and socialized they played a slide show of pictures of everyone. it was great. I do have heaps of pictures, but once again i have misplaced my SD card reader so i can't upload them. but i will find it or get a new one soon so don't worry. we slept in bathurst again because we didn't have time to drive all the way to mudgee. and then we drove to mudgee tuesday morning. then tuesday night we had our branch party which was fun. We did white elephant and played the name game and watched the "he is the gift" video. Justin came so that was really good. It was funny because Langi Setu was there and he's married to one of the daughters of our members but he and his wife live in sydney because he plays for the Sydney roosters. and he just started talking to justin about religion and im sure he didnt expect to have a religious conversation with a professional rugby player that night! hahaha it was great. then wednesday we took some food baskets around to people that the branch had put together. and we had to be in the flat by 6 and that's when we watched frozen, which was awesome. Then christmas i opened my packages and elder stewart called home in the morning, and we went over to a member family for dinner at like 3 and chilled with them for a while, then went over to another member in the evening. it was great. a very merry christmas. Then i talked to you on friday and we tried to score a nice boxing day sale, but there were literally no stores open. not even woolworths! haha ridiculous. 

all-in-all it was a great week. Hope you all had a wonderful christmas and santa brought you what you wanted. (Zechariah 2:6 i think that's proof enough #ibelieve) haha love you all so much. miss you too! have a great week. 

love,

Elder Tingey

Week 72

hello family, i'm on and i have no time today because we only have a half p-day since yesterday was christmas conference. So I just wanted to send a quick email and let yous all know that i will be calling you on skype at around 10:00 on the 26th for me so that should be in the evening sometime on christmas for you. let me know if there's a better time for you because i think i'm pretty flexible timewise. It was a fun week hope you all had a good one as well. and i will talk to you on christmas!!!! Love you!!!!

Week 71

Transfers!!!! 

absolutely nothing happened. haha only two elders got transferred from our zone and there was a little bit of drama behind it, but nothing big. but they DID switch up the districts so i went from a district of 3 companionships of elders to a district of 2 companionships of elders and 2 companionships of sisters..... good news is i still only have to give a training once a month! haha good stuff. so i will be here in mudgee for Christmas! should be fun. Our neighbor is way into the christmas spirit. i'm pretty sure if this were utah he'd have the Tingey mobile packed with kids and driving past to look at it. hahaha i'll take a picture and send it to you. 

Also, the reason i'm emailing today is because ELder Stewart called president and got permission for us to have P-day today since neither of us are getting transferred and we're out here on our own. So i'm not breaking rules. don't worry.

It was a pretty slow week. we had trade-offs with the zone leaders, which was good. i was down in orange for the day and i asked about the family Grandma tingey asked about and the members said that they moved out of orange. orange is like the size of mudgee now. they get like 10-15 people every week. That's a cool area. its a lot more diverse there than mudgee. Here we pretty much have white, a couple aboriginals, and some philipinos. It was a good trade off and i found out the the elder i was with knows Erik Smith! He grew up in Kamas and was friends with him apparently! his name is Elder Weller and i'm pretty sure his first name is Brett. He's the man. 

We had a funny experience with Greg this week. We were teaching and using the pamphlet to explain and we each had one and he was looking at his pamphlet and then looking at mine and then back to his and then he stopped me and said, ''why does mine have the black people?'' haha it was really funny because the pamphlets are tailored to race so some have all white people in the pictures and some have all black people. we laughed for a while. he's doing good.

Nothing else much happened and i'm going to have to cut this short. sorry but i'll talk to you all next week!

-Elder tingey

Week 70

Putting my best side forward...

Good morning from beautiful Mudgee! It really IS beautiful right now because it's been raining all week and the landscape has gone from all yellow and brown to green and it's awesome. It's a true answer to prayers because it hasn't rained for a long time and the farmers were suffering big time. There wasn't much for the animals to eat. and that's all anyone would ever talk to us about when we contacted people. haha but now we've gotten the rain that we needed. Last night was crazy. It was pouring rain and the lightning was nuts. i don't know why but we get heaps of lightning here. if it rains, there will be lightning. and last night was the coolest thing ever. we both woke up to a huge boom of thunder that sounded like it was right above our roof, and then we sat awake for like an hour watching the flashes of lightning. haha good thing our flat is dedicated!

Last monday our branch president called us and asked if we could come over for dinner and FHE so we went over and had dinner and then our man Greg Barto came over for FHE! it was really good. Greg is the man. He's like the busiest man i've ever met, but i think we're going to try to go help him out on the farm and hopefully free up some of his time so he can do things like come to church. I really hope something happens soon.

We got a young men's president for the branch last week and he's gun as so i think that will be a really good thing. we've only got 2 young men, but they're pretty keen to get their friends coming to activities and church and stuff so i think something will happen with that.

At our ZTM this week they introduced the "He is the Gift" initiative. Are they doing that back home? haha i guess it would be less likely for you to know because you only have one companionship for the whole stake. but if you haven't yet, go to christmas.mormon.org and watch the video! It's pretty sweet. but we have all these special He is the Gift pass-along cards that they want us to hand out all of them before christmas. so we've been trying to hand all those out. Apparently it's supposed to be a church-wide thing.

I got my christmas package on friday! hahahhahaha good thing you sent it early! haha thank you i opened it and i love all the presents! hahahaha Just kidding! i just get to stare at it for the next 3 weeks. haha so i put it in one of the closets we never open.

It's weird to me that this is the last week of the transfer. I can't decide if it's gone by fast or slow. It's interesting how the Lord works. i've constantly been growing on this mission, but i feel like each area has shaped me differently. Some areas help you become a better teacher, some a better planner, some a leader. I feel like this transfer was meant to help me find where i stand in life and what kind of person i want to be for the rest of my life and ultimately eternity. I'm extremely grateful for the Holy Ghost that can help me distinguish between truth and people's philosophies. haha not sure if that makes sense, it does to me, but it's hard to explain.

Yesterday we fasted as a mission for every companionship to get a baptism in January. It's gonna take a miracle for us, so it's a good thing we're in the industry of miracles! haha Love you all. have a wonderful week and if you go to Winder Dairy you better get a picture with all the kids on santa's lap and send it to me. and also a picture of the scones. man i miss waiting in that line for 3 hours.... hahaha dang it i love christmas time.

Love,

Elder Tingey

PS  i am able to skype again this year so i'll do it on the 26th for me which will be christmas for yous. not sure of what time yet, but i'll let you know.

PPS a chinese girl just sat down at the computer next to me. she was speaking cantonese to her friend but we'll talk to her anyways... hahaha