Week 55

Alright here we are once again! 

Yesterday we had a surprise MLC but they didn't want us to drive up because we have another one on saturday with Elder Oriordan of the Seventy that we will be going to so they had us skype in at the chapel. It was awful. It was us and the sister training leaders in a classroom in the church for like 4 hours. We got trained on how to recognize and help missionaries that are struggling with depression. and then halfway through the meeting the rest of the missionaries came to the chapel because it was their p-day and they played volleyball and basketball while we sat in that stupid room... hahah i was DYING.

We had zone conference this past week and it was great. During our lunch break president back got out 18 paddles and a tennis ball and we played a huge game of like four square, but it was with 18 squares and you had to use the paddle and no slamming (you had to hit it up). It was pretty sweet. haha i love president Back. He and sister back are probably the only reason i'm okay with sitting through long meetings in sydney. They are awesome.

This past week we were able to go visit Hoa and she told us that she needs some time to study the book of mormon. She feels like buddhism and our church both teach us to be good people and she is scared of all the rules in our church. SO pretty much she dropped us. She said we can go by whenever we want but she doesn't want to waste our time. We testified of the importance of christ in our lives and i hope as she reads the book of mormon she will come to know the importance of christ. But now it's between her and the Lord. She's great and it was tough to hear but she'll get it someday.

Nothing else really happened this week. We had like 6 people committed to come to church and ended up with 1 so that was disappointing. but we did meet a less-active family from africa which was pretty sweet. They said they will be coming to church this week so i'm happy about that.

Love you all! sorry this week's is so short. Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Tingey

Week 54

Good week. Lots of good stuff happening. We picked up a few new investigators and the zone had two baptisms this week! One of the new investigators we met is named Jonathan. We had talked to this crazy guy from sri lanka the day before and the guy told us he lived in unit 12 and pointed us in a direction when we met him so we didn't have a street or a street number which made it difficult. So we ended up knocking like 5 different unit 12s and for some reason nobody answered any of the doors. So after the 4th one we kindof had one of those experiences where we were both disappointed but we just kindof kept walking. we didn't say anything to each other, we just kindof walked. and we walked past this guy who was working on his car so we asked him if he knew where a unit 12 was and he of course asked the street and house number which we told him we didn't have so he laughed at us, put his tools down and started walking with us. He's from africa somewhere, i can't remember which country, and his name is jonathan and he told us we could come back to see him! haha it was great. I love being in the right place at the right time.

 Last week for P-day we played sport at the chapel with the belconen elders. Elder Bowcut was still up in sydney picking up his trainee (Elder Smith) so there were only 6 of us there and the islanders only want to play volleyball so we played 3 on 3 volleyball which was pretty fun but then after we finished they showed us this video they had taken earlier that day. Now keep in mind their flat has 3 islanders and a palangi. but apparently what happened was they were driving and complaining about how its not even halfway through the month and they were all out of money and then elder Peleuale yells "stop the car!" so they stop on the side of the road and he gets out and starts running back and so they follow him and they all end up standing around a kangaroo that had become roadkill. so naturally they picked it up and tossed it in the boot and took it home. In the back yard they used kitchen knifes to skin it, gut it, and cut it into pieces to put it in the freezer. This was all on video that they showed me. It was hilarious. Then they made curry with it and they said there's extras so we are probably going to go give it a try. hahaha i just want to wait a bit to see if they all end up in the hospital or not....

We had a pretty hectic miracle happen to us this week. We were sitting down to plan one night, and we were talking about all our appointments that had fallen through and dreading what our numbers were going to look like this week when our phone buzzed! It was a text from a former named yang Bai. not sure if you remember her, but she dropped us about 6 weeks ago. when she dropped us she told us she was going through a hard time and couldn't meet with us, but the text she sent us said she had figured it all out and she wanted to meet up again! AND she said her boyfriend wanted to know "the jesus christ". :) so we set up an appointment and went over there on sunday. Found out she has moved to the uni housing and lives right next door to one of the members of our ward! so we taught her boyfriend, Violet, about the plan of salvation and how Jesus Christ plays such a pivotal role in that plan and yang bai was pretty much a member present for us! haha she's met with heaps of missionaries before and pretty much knows everything. She taught him how to pray right in front of us. haha then when we asked her to say the closing prayer she made Violet do it! hahaha it was awesome. One of the best first prayers i've ever been a part of. We all had our eyes open for most of it and she was telling him what to say and then our member present was explaining that you can say whatever you feel like and then we finished it up correctly and it was all good! He's really good. that would be some people you could pray for. yang bai and Violet. Once again, i'm not sure who is in charge of giving chinese people english names but it's cool. haha

We met with this chinese girl named Wilma this week and we talked about the restoration because most of the questions she asked us had to do with why there were so many churches and what was the difference between our church and the other christian churches. So we had a good talk about the restoration and every once in a while she would ask me to explain in chinese and i couldn't tell if she really didn't understand, or if she was just trying to test my chinese... haha but it went well. and after the lesson we were just chatting and she asked us if there were certain things we weren't allowed to do. I didn't want to get into all the commandments right then so i just listed off the 10 commandments for her and she then proceeded to ask if everyone followed those. I said yes and then she asked "what is the worst thing you've done in your life?" hahahahaha that definitely took me by surprise, but being as witty as i am, i asked back "what's the worst thing YOU'VE done in your life??" hahaha she just kindof laughed and said, "okay maybe lets just not talk about that..." hahaha it was funny. but we weren't done there. She then told us that she can do the chinese face and palm reading and this weird card reading which i'm pretty sure is like witchcraft, but hey, how many times to meet someone like that. So we asked her to read our faces. First thing she told us was that we are the first people she has ever met with green eyes, (weird, i know.) then she told me that my ears are a good shape and size. (means i'm very healthy) and then she said "it's hard to explain in english. can i use chinese?" so i said yes but speak slowly so then she went on to describe my nose and somthing about how my nose is not flat like chinese peoples'. and whatever else she said i have no idea but i don't think it was too bad.... hahah then she said my forehead was large which meant i'm smart, and then she told me that my eyebrows are thick, and she said something in chinese i didn't know so i asked her to say it in english and she said that it meant i'm a player..... i don't know if any of you realize how weird it was for me to have a chinese girl tell me that.... but hey, the face NEVER lies, right??? hahahahaha apparently my hands are good too because she told me i'm smart from them as well. hahahah all in all, i think it was pretty accurate. not sure if it's true doctrine, in fact i'm pretty much positive it's not, but it was funny. She's great but she doesn't want to have two on one lessons. she wants to sit in while we teach someone else. Not sure how we figure out how to do that, but we'll think of something.

This past week we started our diet, but it kindof got ruined by the two tongan baptisms that happened. Oh well, there are worse things that could happen than ruining a diet. We'll try again this week. Okay love you all! have a great week! I found out there's a zoo in canberra so i'm really excited to go there some p-day in the future! I have to give a talk at our zone conference this friday.... dang it. hahaha

Love,

Elder Tingey

Week 53

Alright so it was an extremely interesting week. Started off kinda sad. We went to visit Hoa because she hasn't been answering our calls or texts and we knocked on the door and she answered and invited us in, but her husband wasn't there so we had to stand at the door, but she told us that last week she had the baby and it passed away shortly after birth. Man, I felt so bad for her. I think that's the most pure sadness i've felt on my mission so far. She was so strong about it too. She said she was pretty depressed all last week, but she's getting better now. So we did all we could and testified of the plan of salvation and that she can live with that child forever. I think she appreciated it, but she doesn't really show emotion so it's hard to tell. Love her to death. Please pray for her and her family.

We had Zone Training meeting this past friday and because they got rid of the transfer meeting we decided to have the home-bound missionaries share their testimonies. It was great to hear them. Elder Whiting is the man. He said something that i really liked. He talked about how a lot of people will ask you Why you came on a mission, but he'd rather people asked why he stayed on a mission. I think that's really true. I definitely didn't fully know what to expect when i came out,  but when I was able to see the gospel bless people's lives and see how serving the Lord has changed me, i think that's why i'm still out here.

We got transfer calls on saturday. Elder Cheng got transferred. And he's going to......... CAMDEN. hahahahahah he was sooo mad. Not sure what he has in store for him there, but there's gotta be a reason. haha and elder Bowcut is training a missionary so he will pick him up tomorrow. It was pretty crazy without a transfer meeting, and we had to leave canberra at 6:00 am and drive everyone that got transferred up to a chapel in sydney and they had a few chapels as meeting points and they hired a van and a trailer and drove around picking everyone up and taking them to another chapel where they would be put in a car and taken to their new area. It worked out pretty well. But they were an hour late so there was no real reason to wake up half an hour early... but of course i would never make any sarcastic comments about that to anyone... hahaha It was funny because i drove up a car with two white missionaries and a chinese, and then drove back with 4 polynesians. hahaha it was an interesting switch. But while we were up in sydney we were at the same chapel as the people from wollongong and elder wang got transferred and he told me they had a baptism this past week of a man named Rio. He asked if i remembered him and i assured him i had never met anyone named Rio in Wollongong. He told me we taught him and then i realized that this whole time i had been calling our investigator Real the wrong name.... hahaha i don't know if you remember him, but he got baptized! He was the first person i ever did the first vision to in chinese! haha it was so cool to hear. Made me so happy. Tender mercies everywhere. We got a bunch of great missionaries in our zone and i think its going to be a great transfer.

We met with Jeremy and invited him to be baptized and he said it is something that needs to be seriously considered so he's going to be searching for an answer so if yous could pray for him that would be awesome. He's a stud.

Love you all! have a great week!

Love,

Elder Tingey

Week 52

Alright so it was another week in paradise here in Can "burrrrr" a. hahaha It's very cold here. It snowed on Friday. I THOUGHT I WAS GETTING AWAY FROM SNOW FOR TWO YEARS!!!! hahaha but anyways i'll tell you about the things i did this week.

On P-day we went laser tagging with all the elders. We were going to do a p-day with all the zone, but the sisters called sunday night and asked if they could do a sisters' zone p-day and we said okay because in all reality, it's much easier planning a zone p-day for just elders.... sorry becca. (plus we aren't allowed to go laser-tagging with sisters because there was an incident a while back....) So that was very fun. I don't know if this will make you proud of me or ashamed, but i came in second place in the first game. hahaha I was smashing it! It was lots of fun. The second game i got like sixth, but we'll just dwell on the first game.

I went on trade-offs with Elder Cheng on Wednesday and it was almost like old times, except we actually taught people! haha He's gotten a lot better. We met this guy named Grant who was pretty crazy. hahaha he was talking to me about this drug he did that is like shrooms, but you have hallucinations for like a week straight and some people go blind from it and he tried it twice. hahaha and that was part of his response to "so what role has religion played in your life?" hahahaha it was great. He was such a nice guy. But his flat was probably the scariest flat i've ever stepped foot in.

Thursday we did service for a sister in our ward. We mowed the lawn and cleaned out her raingutters. It took for flippin ever and i was standing on the ricketiest old ladder you've ever seen. It was proof that missionaries are watched over, because i probably should have fallen and died. but we finished up the service and she played the bagpipes for us. it was pretty sweet and we filmed it with the phone, and i figured out that i can put my microSD card into the camera and get the video so i'll try to send it to you. haha she's pretty cool. She's going to scottland for the world championships for bagpipe bands. So we wished her luck and she told us that if we want to learn, she will teach us how to play so maybe i will return home with some special skills!

Friday it snowed and we met with Jeremy and the Uni library. he's great. We taught him the gospel of Jesus Christ and he told us that he needs to increase his faith in christ so we had him read alma 32 and we are going to talk to him about it this friday. Haha he always says the prayer at the end of our lessons and he always forget's my companion's name so he says "thank you for sending Tian and his friend to help me learn the gospel" hahaha its awesome. He's pretty stoked that Jeremy Lynn went to the Lakers.

Saturday we were supposed to meet with Ruth, but she texted us and told us that she found a chinese church in Canberra so she doesn't want to meet anymore... DANGIT. I was so sad. I thought she was golden. But that's alright because we got a referral this week from Wollongong for a chinese girl named Wilma that we are meeting with on friday. Pray for her please!

Sunday we went to church and we got permission, because MLC was yesterday, to train up sunday night and sleep over at the Assistants' flat. So we drove up to Goulburn and then caught the train from there to sydney. It was about a 3 hr train ride. but the only problem was it stopped at the Syney Central Station which is totally in the North mission hahaha and it's about a 15 minute walk from the Opera house! hahaha but we were obedient missionaries and got right back on a train going toward mortdale and didn't do anything exciting. We were hoping to see some north missionaries at the station, so we could mess with them, but there weren't any. haha there's kind of a rivalry between the north and south missionaries even though we don't know each other, but from what i've heard, President howes, the north mission president, pretty much rigged the last transfer before the mission split so that all the good missionaries would be in the north and all the scrubs would be in the south. hahaha not sure if it's true or not, but everyone in the south that served under President Howes seems to not like him very much because of it...haha mission drama.

So yesterday was MLC and I had kindof a cool experience. So thursday night we do a conference call with all the Zone leaders and the APs and last thursday they told us that President was looking at getting rid of the transfer meeting and that we'd be discussing it at MLC. Now i love transfer meeting and i was so angry that they were trying to get rid of it. So for the next three days i mulled over in my head what i was going to say at MLC to get them to keep it. I got to the point where i felt like i had a pretty good argument for it, but for some reason on sunday night i said my prayers and asked for confirmation as to what should be done about transfer meeting and i was sitting in MLC getting ready to die a martyr for it and as President Back was bringing it up I felt the spirit so strongly and for some reason i just knew that getting rid of it would help the mission. Haha it was nuts how fast my heart changed on it. Cool how the spirit can do that. haha that's not to say i wasn't frustrated with some of the aspiring missionaries in there, but it was a good MLC.

We got a ride from the STLs back to Goulburn and then visited a less-active on our ward list. He invited us in and while we were talking and he told us that we were the first elders to get past the front door. and after we shared a message with him and his kids he invited us back for dinner! Man i'm really excited. he's awesome. It was a sweet miracle.

I got your package! It was awesome! the flash cards are perfect and we had a good laugh about the One-piece. hahaha i'd send you a picture, but i don't know if that's appropriate.... haha. the shirts fit and the tie is skucks. (Have i told yous about skucks? it means good looking haha) I almost cried when i saw the Hi-Chews. haha thank you soo much. and the A-1 and Ketchup are always a happy thing to get :) haha i don't know what was wrong with the mail, but i got a letter everyday for three days this week so they must have been backed up or something... but i'm getting your letters! don't even worry about it.

Okay there's my mid-way letter. haha it's week 52. Can't believe it. we're going to throw a party on thursday. It's crazy how fast the time has gone, and yet slow at the same time. i feel like i've been a missionary for ever, but it still feels like yesterday i was bummin around Holladay. haha weird. Love you all! have a good week!

Love,

Elder Tingey

Week 51

G'day. Hope you're all having a wonderful sunday. It's just another beautiful day in Canberra today. It's getting warmer here. Slowly, but surely. haha i think they just sent me down here for the cold part of the year and once it gets warmer they're going to send me up to Sydney where it's just really hot. Hopefully not. I'd be totally fine to celebrate Christmas here.

Update on people: Hoa is doing good. we went over there and talked to her for a bit. It was short because i didn't want to keep her out of bed for too long. SHe's been having trouble understanding the book of mormon because the vietnamese translation is apparently really hard to understand. And she's not the only person who's told me that. In wollongong we had a vietnamese member who couldn't understand the book of mormon very well in Vietnamese. And then the english translation is really difficult for her to understand as well so we have started reading with her. We read the story of Nephi and his brothers getting the plates and she seemed to really like how brave Nephi was. Haha i told her she is brave too, going through what she's going through. She's awesome. We just got her a book of mormon stories book that has all the pictures and stuff. i think that will help her understand it more. 

Our boy Scott told us he is moving to hong Kong. he said he wants to live with his idol, Bruce Li. Good news is that he knows a little bit of chinese. He said he knows some swear words and numbers so i asked how to say 17 and said shi san, which was close enough to convince me! He's going to save his government pension to buy a plane ticket and then fly there and get chinese citizenship. I told him to call us if he needs help packing up because he said he only wants to take one suitcase and i just know there's hidden treasures in that flat. haha just kidding but he really said he's moving to hong kong so we're going to miss him if he goes.

We were walking through the city on wednesday and we were standing at a cross walk and it was like an island thing in the middle of the road, and elder pederson (we were on trade-offs) leaned in close and said, "i think we might need a priesthood holder..." so i looked around and saw that standing on the island behind us was about 9 chinese girls and we started cracking up. And then we contacted one of them and met Ruth! Ruth is from CHina studying at ANU. She told us she is already Christian! So we talked to her about what we do as missionaries and asked if we could meet up and she said yes! so we met up and talked on saturday and we taught the restoration and invited her to be baptized and she said yes! I was so excited. And she's going to read the book of mormon. We are meeting with her this saturday again. Really excited about it.

Yang Bai texted us and told us she doesn't want to meet for a while. She said she's going through some things at the moment she needs to straighten out. So we're praying for her to text us. She's the one who has been taught everything and wants to be baptized she just needed to move out or get married. So hopefully she texts us back because she was really cool.

I had a cool experience on sunday. We got to church and this guy walked in and came up and asked me if Elder Shafer was here today and i told him that elder Shafer had been transfered and my companion and i had replaced him and his companion. So he told me his name was Reza. He is from Iran and he is a member of our ward but he goes to woden ward. So we were talking a bit before sacrament started and i asked him when he got baptized and he said a bout 5 years ago in Canada. I said that was pretty cool and we kept talking and he asked me where i was from and when i said Utah, he asked, "do you know elder Neff?" haha that seems to be everyone's reply. People i guess think if you live in utah, you know everyone from Utah. so i told him there were a lot of Neffs in Utah but i know some. and he said "do you know Ben Neff? He just got married a couple months ago." hahahaha so if ben neff served in Canada then i definitely met his recent convert! How cool is that?!?! and he wants to serve a mission! So we're going to meet with him this week to talk about what he needs to do. I thought it was flippin awesome. It was cool, too, because i felt the spirit soooooo strong when he told me it was elder Neff that taught him. So if you could figure out the details and let me know that would be awesome. I've already emailed his little sister but if anyone is in close contact with Ben, give him my email and i'll tell him about it. Unless ben didn't serve in Canada, then i would be disappointed... :( haha let me know.

Okay i know it's like feast or famine when it comes to my emails, but i just give yous what i've got. hahaha Love you all! hope lake powell was fun. Mom was nice enough to send some pictures to remind me it's been 2 years since i've been there... hahaha i think i would kill for a wakeboarding run right now. but i'd rather teach people the gospel so its all good. haha. Have a good week!

Love,

Elder Tingey 

Week 50

Pretty good week. 

We did a lot of finding this past week and i wish i could say it payed off, but we didn't have much success as far as finding people goes. But that's alright. we'll keep going regardless. We did have one girl invite us back tuesday to talk to her. haha they found her when i was on trade-offs in a different area and elder Bryce is worried because she's like our age and decently attractive. hahaha I'LL be the judge of THAT. haha it's okay because my missionary goggles are fastened safely on. But apparently she's aussie so it might be the second aussie i teach on my mission! haha the last one got baptized so i'm hopeful! haha 

We got a referral this past week from missionaries up in the North mission for a guy that they had been teaching, and he has come to church a bunch of times and he committed to baptism, but they found out that he lives like an hour out of canberra and just goes up to sydney for work and that's when he'd go to church so they referred him to us and we called him and he was totally keen to meet with us, but he's only at the place they told us he lived (a small town called Tarago) on like monday and tuesday every week so we're not sure how we're going to go about helping him get baptized but we'll keep yous updated!

Just an update on Hoa, She has been in and out of the hospital for the past week because of complications in her pregnancy and because of it she is on strict bed rest. She's at about 23 weeks right now and i think she was having early labor pains or something so they want to keep the baby inside because it's definitely not ready to be born. We visited her in the hospital and then visited with her husband Vin at their house while she was resting. Please please please pray for her. She's taking it like a champ, but it's gotta be hard on her. She will probably be laying in bed for the next like 3 months.

We had interviews with President Back on Friday. Love him. he showed me the message dad left on his phone as he was leaving for Sydney! hahaha and then he was like "i hope that doesnt make you trunky." hahah he's the man. You can just tell that he is inspired in his calling and i'm excited to see where the mission is at in 1 year.

Yang Bai got back from traveling last week and she moved into her new apartment. We are hoping to meet up with her this week and set up a baptismal date! Simon also was supposed to get back from china last week, but he didn't answer our calls and wasnt home when we stopped by. Hopefully we can meet with him as well and set up a date for him too!

Hope you are all loving life and finding missionary opportunities everywhere! We had a gospel principals lesson on fasting this week and i had a prompting i should fast with you this week so i'm going to be fasting on wednesday for me which should be tuesday for you. Love you all heaps! Have a good week!

love,

Elder Tingey

Week 49

Quite an interesting week. 

It's amazing how at the end of every week you feel the same amount of exhaustion, but some weeks seem to have more to talk about than others. This week not much happened. Except We had to travel down to queanbeyan to get a "working with Children" background check done. it's this new thing in NSW where people have to be checked in order to work with kids. so all the missionaries had to do it, but since we actually aren't in NSW (we're in the ACT) we had to travel outside of the ACT to go get it. Side note: we got our car back, but they cut us 500 ks so we've been walking a ton still. So to save ks we decided to take public transport. Problem is, public transport isn't very simple when you're going inter-state so it was quite an adventure for the four of us. Haha it was funny because we got there really smoothly. we only had to wait in the city for half an hour for a bus to take us down to the south side of the ACT and then the train from fishwick to queanbeyan left right away and it wasn't a very long walk to the RMS where we got the check done, but the way back was a different story. We had to wait about 2 1/2 hours for the train back, and then the bus was another half hour to the city, and another half hour to our flat... haha and we saved a total of 60 ks.... but we talked to heaps of people along the way so it was good.

We've been doing a lot of finding recently because our teaching pool is pretty small. But this week i'm really excited because 2 former investigators are coming back to canberra. one was in china, and the other was travelling australia and they both had baptismal dates at one point. so we're praying for them. It's Simon and Yang bai. They're solid.

There's not a whole ton else to write about. We're trying to start a chinese gospel principles class for the chinese investigators, so i'll let you know how that ends up. We have interviews with president this friday so i'm also excited for that.

Love you all heaps! If you have any questions for me i'd love to answer them! haha give me something more to write because i know mom is going to be mad my letter is this short this week.... hahahaha sorry.

Elder Tingey