Bring on The Mission Tan

Kia Ora!

So it's definitely starting to warm up here, and I love it! I love those days when the weather is PERFECT. I wish the weather would be perfect for like a month, but unfortunately those days are pretty rare. I'm starting to get a lovely watch tan, and last week we had a lesson with a recent convert outside and I think I got a little pink on my neck. Bring on the farmers tan, haha

So we started teaching this Samoan man. We met him when we went over to a part member home, the wife is a member and we have been trying to get a hold of her non member husband who comes to church quite often, and his friend, Tao, was over watching rugby, so we started talking to him and had a lesson with him this week and things are going good. He's been to church one and came to conference this weekend and yeah, things are good. During our lesson though, we asked him to say the closing prayer and he wanted to hold our hands, you can imagine how much I loved that. & he was also using his Samoan bible and so when we would look up scriptures in ours, he would tell us to read out loud and he would jsut read his, but he was having a hard time finding James. He said it was Jacob, and we read James 1:5-6 probably 5 times, he kept reading his verses and saying "read the first one again...read the second one again..."  trying to figure out if he had the right verses, it was pretty crazy, so we gave him a Book  of Mormon in Samoan and English, we'll see how future lessons go.

So last night we had some awesome experiences tracting. We were on our way home and our mission president wants us to speak to a minimum of 150 people per week, and our goal was 170 and we haven't been reaching our goal the last couple of weeks, but we were determined to reach it this week. Long story short: we're supposed to be home at 7:30 on Sundays, but because of the training program, we have to have 2 hrs of comp study every day, so we do it in the evening on Sundays, and we usually go home at 5:30 to get that done, but we were determined to get our goal! So we were going to tract on Princess street, but as we were driving down Margaret to get to Princess street, we decided to just stop on Margaret and the first door we knocked on, we got a follow up appointment with the guy and I feel good about him, I think there's definitely potential. And then further down the road, a lady opened the door and said, "Hello sisters" turns out she's inactive and has been for several years, but lately has really been thinking about coming back to church, and I know that Heavenly Father knew that she needed us to see her. She said that her word of wisdom issues are what have been keeping her from church, but she's quit smoking for a couple of years now and is working on some other habits. And she has a 19 yr old daughter who was baptized when she was 9, and her son is 8 and she was thinking how she wants her son to be baptized while he's still 8, so we're going to start teaching her and her son the lessons as a refresher for her and to teacher her son about the church and yeah, it was just an awesome experience. I walked out of her house loving her even though I had known her for like 20 minutes and I'm so excited to work with her more! Then we knocked on the door of this lady I talked to on the street the other day. So we were driving down this pretty big street, Sis Perry pulled over and I ran across the street and was basically running after this lady who was running after her kids, all I said that we were missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and when she said she had to catch her kids, I asked if we could come by her house later and she gave me her name and address. Well we obviously hadn't been by her house yet and forgot she lived on Margaret, but we knocked on her door and she said, "oh yeah, I talked to you the other day" Thankfully I remembered her name, and it turns out her mum was baptized when she was younger and when to Church College, but left the church when she got married, but yeah, we have an appointment her this week too. And then we got home, and this less active girl called us. We met her ex-husband, Anwar (they split up about 2 months ago), & I don't remember giving Anwar our number, but he obviously told Geraldine we came by looking for them both, and Geraldine called us and said her and her friend want us to come teach them. YES! Ahhh, it was so exciting because we've had such a hard time finding people and it was amazing to see the blessings as we really pushed to reach our goal!

We watched Conference this weekend and I felt so left out since we were watching it so late, haha, and it was also weird not being there. The Conference Center has never been further from me and I feel so blessed to have been able to go to conference so much! Love you all! Hope you enjoyed conference a week ago!

Arohanui (I think that's the word, haha, I'm slowly picking up more maori),
Sis. Mullen