Dear friends and family,
It has been a good week but a little slow. My companion has been having some health problems and we were at the doctors for a bit while he had to get an X-ray and we found out that he has spinal problems but nothing too serious. The aboriginal lady we ran into last week that said she wanted to get closer to god wasn't at the appointment that we had made for her. We ended up feeling a little suspicious because of her requests but we are still going to go back this next week and try to help her out.
Ian, our investigator who we are baptising soon is the man aye. He has been keeping all the commitments that we have given him and doing everything in preparation for his baptism. Yesterday at church, we taught him about baptism in the Gospel Principals manual and the importance. We asked him what baptism meant to him and how it would be a new start. I am SOO excited for it and it is going to be a mean baptism.
The other day we were on exchanges with the missionaries in Rockingham and I was with elder Fatopaito. It was way fun, but super hot aye!! we biked out into this country area and tracted for a little while with flies buzzing all around us. It was fun but nobody was interested so we went to our next appointment in our zone leaders area. We did service for a lady in the ward by helping her weed her entire backyard for her house inspection the next week. It was super hot then because it was the middle of the day. It ended up being 98degrees outside. We later went to the ward mission leaders house for a BBQ because one of the YSA is leaving on a mission soon and he had some non-member friends we were going to teach. When we got there, we sat around the pool (sadly we weren't allowed to get in) and we talked with the other guys who were swimming. We ate and afterward chatted a little while one of the other young men was playing the guitar. After a little while the non-member friends started asking us why we weren't allowed to get into the pool and we told them about some of the many mission rules we adhere to. They were quite interested and we started talking heaps about standards of church member. I am so grateful that I had a 'For strength of Youth' pamphlet in my bag because I was able to read segments in it to tell them why we do the many things we do. We talked about the word of wisdom, tithing, law of chastity, and especially about the book of Mormon right at the end. I told them that there is no way in heaven or on earth that they would find out if what we had been talking about was true unless they read it and prayed about it. The spirit was felt so much that night and they committed to start reading it.
It is so amazing to see what Heavenly Father does for us when we work hard.
Elder Butts