Bitter Sweet Week

G'day Mates!

Fair Dinkum its good to hear from you all haha. Elder Kerr and I had a Bitter sweet week this week. It was a roller coaster ride but in the end it was really good. I should be used to riding this roller coaster by now though eh? We saw many many miracles this week. This week we smashed our record of the number of investigators we find in a week. We found 15 new investigators this week. 15!! Thats INSANE for us. It was crazy as business...as. haha. I'm sure in some of the South American missions they find like 30 or something ridiculous like that but 15 was heaps for us. You can probabaly recall me whining about how we cant find investigators and its really hard to find investigators(which it is) but man I've never taught so many first lessons(Restoration) in a week than I did this week. It was so exciting!! I honestly cant really say we did anything different either. haha I know buzz kill as. I wish there was a secret formula like you pray for 30 min straight then fast for 17 and a half hours and then talk to a certain number of people a day and then BAM you have a new investigator but it doesnt work that way. The Great Sydney Mission has a new policy though. It expected of us to do at least 2 hours of Street contacting or tracting, or both, a day. We were doing that before but I guess now it is an even more sacred time of the day. Me and Elder Kerr have been as diligent as possible and thankfully the Lord has blessed us with people to teach. At the beginning of the week we found quite a few potentials and by the end of the week we had turned most of those people into new investigators. The most exciting new investigator experience we had this week is we found a family!! YAY! WOO! It was a very cool experience. They are Burmese! Cool eh? Luckily the Young man Paulian that I GQ'd on the street speaks pretty good english. They like us a lot, they said "Your white, we're black but we both love Jesus. That makes us family." So cool. By the way they have 9 in their family and the youngest child is 9 haha. So they are ALL baptism age! It was the first experience on my mission where I have taught a whole family at once with the Father and Mother listening too. We got to know one another and then we watched Finding Faith in Christ. The spirit was sweet. Elder Kerr and I bore strong testimony of the Divinity of Christ and also of the Restoration. We also told them that we are representatives of Jesus Christ, messengers of truth. And that our message is that there is a living prophet today Thomas S. Monson and Twelve Apostles again on the Earth. Everything was very new to them but they are curious to learn more. We'll be seeing them again this week. We had another similar experience this week with an African family too. But it will take too long to telll you that one as well.



So there was a lot of sweet experiences we had this week. The bitter ones was we didnt get anyone to church and when you dont get an investigator to church everything just sucks pretty much. Also we found out that the church has no gospel material in Burmese so its gonna be tough trying to teach the Naulak family. Darn. But I know that the spirit will be there and if they open their hearts the spirit will flow in and they will recieve a witness of the Restoration too. Another Sweet experience we had was we gave two chapel tours. I love giving chapel tours. I like to think of it how when you get a new house you just want to show everyone and you love living there and you love visiting there. Well the chapel is the Lord's house and he's left it up to us to show the rest of Heavenly Father's children where His house is, whats inside and why we love going there every sunday. We gave a chapel tour to one of our members Mum who hasnt listened to the missionaries since her son (bro. blundell) decided to get baptised. So we were the lucky ones to really introduce her to the church. She loved the chapel tour and we gave her a Book of Mormon in Indonesian.(not just for fun she actually really is Indonesian). Also I found out she loves music so at the end of the chapel tour we all went into the chapel and I sang a hymn for her. I sang How Great thou Art and I made sure that she followed along with the words because the words are so beautiful. I love that hymn. That was a sweet moment. I also had another opprotunity to sing a hymn to a Priest and Bishop from the Greek Orthodox church BUT that will just have to be a story for another day :). I love you all. This church. Is God's church. I know that is true. Latas!

Elder Nelson


Mum!!

I dont have much time because I have already taken forever because I decided to write a novel. Holy cow. This week was very exciting though. So many stories to tell but so little time. Well I just wanted to say how FREAKING EXCITED I WAS READING THOSE EMAILS TODAY AND LOOKING AT THOSE PICTURES!!! Man......I miss you all heaps as. But its all sweet I got work to do. Thank you for bringing such great news! Bryce you are a monster! Keep up the good work. Stephen that picture of you singing in the Football gear. Sexy. haha. Nah thats cool as though. You must be getting heaps of "fans" if ya know what I mean. Mum i'm so proud of you for giving that talk and it sounds like it went really well. Christin and her family look so good. Dad you are a legend. I already told my companion your building "Zion the New Jerusalem which shall be built upon the American continent" as we speak. haha. Thats really cool though. Wow so many blessings! I dont think I can even count them all. Oh by the way Johnathan's getting baptized this weekend! Get excited! Hopefully satan backs off. Or else I'll have to bust a cap in his Ace hahaha. Well times up gotta go Love ya all. Stephen i'll write you. cya

Music to my ears!

G'day Mates!

Happy Halloween!! Sounds like you had a great weekend of fun! For Halloween we went to Kiri Perusco's house(she's in our ward) and she had her house all decorated and she had made us some dinner with a red velvet cake that had fake spiders all over it. We had a good time with them. We had some trick or treaters stop by as we were eating too so I took the opprotunity and gave the little kids some treats as they came to the door. Pass a long cards!!! haha jk I really gave them treats and I thought it was funny because they probably thought my proselyting clothes was just a costume. Aussies dont really celebrate halloween its lame as.

Transfers are here and I'm getting transferred toooo..... the South Island, New Zealand Mission!!! Can you believe it?? I guess they really need missionaries over there and I was first draft pick so ya know they just NEED ME...haha jokes! Mum you believed it eh? Gulible as. But transfers really have come and gone and it was sad to see Elder Stringam go. He was a great companion and I learned a lot from him. Great missionary. He went to the Samoan Ward in Campbelltown haha. He's gonna get MASSIVE! This is his first time serving in an Islander ward plus he's going home soon so they are gonna stuff him to the rafters. And he's not the skinniest missionary either. Poor guy. Bless his heart.(seriously he'll be in danger of a heart attack). I'm still in the Gong and my new companion is Elder Kerr from Las Vegas. So far so good. He knows his scriptures really well and he's a good teacher. I'm supposed to train him as a Zone Leader. Hopefully all goes well. He's been out 6 weeks less than me. I love new beginnings I have so many things that I want to improve on this transfer. Like I want to memorize more scriptures. Thats one of my main ones. I'm excited for this transfer.

So Johnathan is doing pretty well. We had a great lesson this past week. He's been praying a lot and he's been thinking a lot about quitting drinking and he decided that he is!(took him long enough) We've set another date with him for the 20th of November so hopefully all goes well. Pray for him please? He seems pretty set on it though. He works heaps too so we only get to see him once a week which is a bummer. We're really blessed to have the investigators we have right now. We're gonna do our best to get them to church and help them to progress so they can enter into the waters of baptism.

We had Zone Conference this past week. It was great! I learned a lot. President taught us about Planning by the spirit and also beginning our teaching with power and authority. Preach My Gospel style. By the way if the family could get in a habit of studying a bit from preach my gospel every other week or something I think that would be a good idea. Let me know what you think. Elder Iongi and I did a musical number for Zone Conf. too. So fun. I played guitar to Onward Christian Soldiers. Elder Iongi sang the first verse in Tongan, I sang the 2nd verse in English, we sang the 3rd verse in Tongan a capella while harmonizing because Elder Iongi is a fantastic singer and can just bust it out like that and then we repeated the "chorus" at the end and sang the last time in English and Tongan combined. Elder Iongi's family owns the biggest music company in Tonga and all of his family are amazing singers so I felt very priviledged to be able to sing with him. He's also a great missionary. I'm sad he moved areas. We had a lot of fun singing together. I also had the opprotunity to be the chorister for Zone Conference and that was a sweet experience as well. The spirit was so strong as we sang How Firm a Foundation as an army of God. Especially as we sang the 7th verse which reads "I'll Never NO Never No Never forsake." I got major chills up and down my spine as the missionaries sang that which great conviction and feeling. I love music. I've had so many spiritual experiences on my mission tied to music. I'm also so excited that Stephen (and I know Bryce has in the past) took the opprotunity to step out of his comfort zone to find another talent that the Lord has given him and practiced that talent. I cant wait until the day they we can all sing together. And I know that when that day comes we will also be singing praises to our Father in Heaven for his goodness and mercy.

I love you all and I thank Heavenly Father every day to be apart of this great work of saving souls.

"We'll sing and we'll shout with the armies of heaven, Hosanna, Hosanna to God and the Lamb."



Elder Nelson



Mum,

Sounds like Halloween was fun. That sounds pretty awesome that Dan and Darcie might be our neighbors how fun would that be! I'll look for some clothes to buy here. Hopefully I can find some cheap ones. Thank you for also sending your story of your dream. What an amazing dream to have. Almost as good as the Vision of the Tree of Life! Almost...as good. haha. Thanks for the pictures they were great. I just thinking about that last part of your email and the more I think about it the more I think I definitely needed to grow up where I did but maybe stephen and bryce really need to grow up there. It makes me so happy that they are having so many opprotunities to grow their talents too. You'll do great on that talk in Ogden. Just follow the spirit and BE YOURSELF!!! :). Well I better go. Love ya.