Christian on a Mishun

3/ 3/ 2014

1. Me, Elder Hart, and Kat the most recent convert

Dear Family,

Happy Birthday Cadee! 5 years old. . . my days, you're getting too old. It looks like you had a fun time ice skating. Ice Skating birthday parties were always fun. Those poppers look like they were super English. The lame jokes inside are like the British equivalent of laffy-taffy. They're pretty great. Congratulations to Camilla on winning the story telling competition! All of you girls seem to be winning all sorts of things lately. Well done. Keep up the good work.

This week has been a pretty great week. We had Kat's baptism on Tuesday. She's the sister of one of the students in the ward from Vietnam named Annie. She came to study at the university with Annie, and Annie started bringing her to church. Annie invited us over to teach Kat, but she had invited the Sisters over to teach as well. We ended up letting the Sisters take the lead, but we still taught her about once a week. The sisters taught her the main 3 lessons, and we taught most of the commandments. She was the most golden investigator ever. After her fist lesson with the Sisters she asked them "so, what exactly is my relationship with Jesus Christ, and how to do I strengthen it?" What a great question. That's the attitude she kept through the whole teaching process. It was great to be able to be a big part of her teaching process even though she wasn't technically our investigator. Her baptism was probably the best I've been to on my mission so far. She'd been going to FHE and Institute weekly since she arrived, so she had the support of all of the young people in the stake. The turnout was amazing. The spirit was so strong. She bore her testimony after the ordinance and it was one of the most powerful testimonies I have ever heard. We love Kat. I'll attach some pictures of us from after the baptism.

We had a couple of cool little miracles this week. We got a referral last week who we've been trying to contact ever since, but nobody is ever home, and if they are they never answer the door. We tried on Tuesday and a nice Chinese lady answered the door (not the referral we were looking for). She said the man we were looking for wasn't in, but to try back in the evening. We went back the following evening, and she answered the door again. He still wasn't in, but we decided to talk to her. We told her who we were, and she said she already knew who we were. She had met with missionaries about 6 months ago. She has a lot of religious friends and wants to know if God is there. She said the missionaries didn't really help her, so she stopped meeting with them. We started talking about prayer with her and it seemed to spark an interest. She said she had never prayed. We asked her if we could come back another time and teach her more about prayer. She said that would be fine, so we set a time for this week to go back and teach her. On Sunday we were walking down the street and we ran into her with one of her friends. She said "Hi guys!" and then turning to her friend said "these are my friends Hein and Hart." We had a nice little conversation with them on the street and we invited her friend to come to our meeting later this week. So many miracles come from referrals. We are constantly led to people just to be then led to others who might be even more prepared to hear our message. The funny part of this story is that the Chinese lady's name is Xin (pronounced Sin). Apparently we've been knocking on Xin's door a lot lately. . . haha.

We had another cool experience on Saturday. We went to see an investigator in the morning, but he wasn't in. He lives quite close to Michael, so we went to see him instead. We had a nice chat with Michael and invited him to come to church, and then as we were leaving Boon was walking right in front of Michael's house. We haven't been able to get in touch with Boon ever since he dropped us over a month ago. We started talking with him and invited him to church. He came! and he's coming to FHE tonight as well. I imagine it would have been pretty easy for us to just wait around for our next appointment, but since we just rolled with the cancellation and kept on working hard, we were blessed. So much of missionary work is dependent on how much you're willing to do. The more you put in, the more you get out. It's really quite simple.

In other news, driving lessons this week took me past the home of one of the members of One Direction, the location of The Battle of the Roses, the set of Pride and Prejudice, and into London for the first time. Driving in London is crazy; especially in a manual car. I'm going to toot my own horn a little bit here and say that so far I haven't stalled once. I'm pretty proud of that.

That's it for today, folks. I'm all out of time and we're going to go have lunch with the senior couple in the ward. Elder Whitaker was a church history professor at BYU for years and years. He knows everything. It's amazing. I hope you all have a great week! In the words of Elder Nolan, "Hugs and Handshakes"

Love,

Elder Hein

Pictures:

2. Me, Elder Hart, Annie (by Elder Hart), Kat, and their friend My (in the middle)

3. Me, Elder Hart, Sister Formica, Sister Pope, Annie, Kat, and My

2/24/2014

1. Me in front of the Cathedral

Dear Family,

It's nice to hear from you as always. Emails are always one of the highlights of my week. This week has been really good. We seem to be rebuilding a bit. We did a lot more finding this week than we have the last several weeks. Finding is actually really fun when you have the right attitude about it. If you're going out to meet new people and find more people to teach it has the potential to be a really good time. If you're going out because you have nothing else to do and you have to do something, it's rubbish. Thankfully, we had a lot of fun with it this week. We have a few really promising new investigators. Maybe I'll do an investigator update first.

Daryl is doing . . . ok. He feels like he received the answer that he doesn't need to be baptised, but he's willing to still be shown otherwise. He's coming to the baptism of one of the Sister's investigators on Tuesday and he said he'll prepare for that and see how he feels at the baptism. We're praying that he'll receive an answer there. He didn't come to church yesterday because he said he's been missing his old church where there's fun music and clapping and all sorts of fun stuff. He told me on Saturday night and I told him to "have fun at happy clappy church. We'll just be sitting there missing you over in reverent church." Elder Hart thought it was a bit rude. I think there's a difference between being rude and telling the truth. I just pray that he noticed the difference between his old church and how he liked church with us. Anyway, Daryl is still awesome. I'll be sure to get a picture sometime soon to send. I was going to take one at church. . .

John is an investigators of ours we've been working on for the last two months or so now. He's a cute old man from Jamaica that the missionaries have been working with on and off for the last 8 years or so. So far nobody has been able to get him to come to church. . . until Elder Hart and I got him to come yesterday! It was very exciting. We just assumed that because he's been meeting with missionaries for so long, he'd been taught pretty much everything, but we found out last week that he's never even been taught how to pray. We had a whole lesson on how to pray. It makes me wonder what the missionaries before were doing.

Camilla came to Family Home Evening last week, but she wouldn't set up a time to meet this week, and she couldn't come to church either. She's incredibly non-committal. We're still working on her. Her friends that we met with her, however, are doing great! We saw Arnold last week and he said he'll come to church with us this week and bring the other friend John as well. We're seeing them both this week. Maybe the'll be able to drag Camilla along as well.

We had a really cool experience this week with one of our new investigators. On Wednesday evening we were walking back to our flat and a man who was walking in front of us turned around and asked, "what church are you from?" We told him who we were and then he proceeded to complain about the Jehovah Witnesses and how their Bible isn't even the same and he'd been arguing with one of them earlier about it. He's from Bulgaria and speaks in quite broken English, but we offered to get him a Bulgarian Book of Mormon. We told him a little bit about it, read some scriptures and then asked him if there was anyone he knew that we could pray for (it's a sneaky way of asking for a referral we've been encouraged to use by our Zone Leaders). He said his family in Bulgaria (not really much of a referral for us, but that's ok). He's here trying to get enough money to bring them over to have a better life, but he's not having much success. We prayed for him and his family, for which he was very thankful, and set up a time we could see him on Saturday. He said his work schedule is very random, but he'd let us know if Saturday would work. On Saturday morning we got a text that said, "I'm free 2day." We called him and set up that we'd meet him near where we met at 4:00. We were there a bit early and were doing a bit of finding (in a different part of the town centre from where we met), and he found us about 10 minutes early. Not only him, but he'd brought a friend as well! The sneaky referral asking didn't work, but apparently it softened his hart and he wanted to introduce us to a friend. He said, "this is Joanne. She has a lot of questions." We walked with them to an internet cafe that's owned by some ward members (the same one I'm emailing in right now) and taught a really great lesson. The spirit just took over completely and we were able to answer Joanne's questions and help her feel God's love for her. She's an amazing person. She took Iliya (the Bulgarian man) in because he had nowhere to live, and doesn't ask anything in return. She was born in New Zealand, but moved when she was three. She has just recently got in touch with her family there and apparently they are all Mormon. She really wants to come closer to Christ. She feels like she has been very close to Him in the past, but recently has been a bit more distant. She said she was really grateful for the answers we were able to provide for her questions of how to let Christ into her life more. She has been so prepared to accept the Gospel. The most miraculous part of the lesson was when we were talking about church and we were trying to figure out how to get her there. There's no bus that goes to the church near where she lives, and she doesn't drive either. Just as we were talking about transportation another member walked into the Cafe. It just so happened to be the same member who was bringing John to church and he volunteered to take Iliya and Joanne as well. It was amazing. I told them "well there's a miracle for you. What were the chances of him coming here right now?" We set up another time to see them this week, and said we'd see them at church. Unfortunately, there's a less happy ending to this story. Sunday morning, she cancelled on coming to church. We're still not completely sure why. I don't feel discouraged about it though. When we do all we can to invite the spirit and make every arrangement possible for them to do what we've asked them, the rest is up to them. I'm a bit disappointed in her, but I know I did everything I could to help her.

Have I told you about Sam? Sam is the boyfriend of a less active member in the ward. We've been teaching him every week for about a month now, and he's been coming to institute and church, and on Wednesday we invited him to be baptised. He accepted! He said he'd talk to his family this weekend. We're seeing him on Wednesday to see how the talk with his family went and then we'll be able to make baptism arrangements from there. He's a really good guy. I love teaching member referrals. The whole "built in fellowshipper" thing is really nice.

Yesterday we had a very hard day. Hard in a very tasty way. After church we were invited to teach a part member family and have lunch with them. They made so much food! I filled myself up to the very top, plus some. It was like thanksgiving, but Caribbean food. Ox Tail (cow tail) is really nice, by the way. Cattle Feet (cow hoofs) are less nice; they're very chewy. I ate way too much there. We shared a good message though and we're going back to teach the lessons to the non-member mother. We're pretty excited about that. The problem is that I forgot about our dinner appointment scheduled for just two hours later. The dinner appointment was with some less active members called the Gilbanks. Sister Gilbanks is from the Philippines. She cooks very nice food. And she cooks a lot of it. I don't think I have ever eaten so much food. I was barely able to choke down all of the rice and Philippino stew stuff she made when she brought out desert; a large cereal bowl filled with apple strudel and heaping with ice cream. I'm amazed I didn't lose it. The last bite was the hardest. It was like trying to force a camel through the eye of a needle. But I did it.

About the Divers License. The driving tests here are ridiculous. There are all sorts of stupid little things you have to do to pass the test, so I'm taking lessons. Also, I want to get the manual license because it allows you to do more. Automatic vehicle and manual vehicle licenses are two separate things. The manual covers everything though. I also hear insurance is cheaper in the states if you have an English license. Is this true? Could you look that up for me? Anyway, I've had one lesson already, and it went really well. Driving manual cars isn't all that hard. I'll probably need about 8 lessons though to be ready for the test. Each lesson is 25£. The mission covers three of them and all of the test fees. I just have to pay for the extra lessons. I should be able to get the license before my one year of allowance on the US license finishes. I'm having two lessons this week. It's really nice to be behind the wheel again. Driving everywhere is one of the things I'm looking forward to most when I come home.

Last Monday we did some sightseeing in St. Albans. We saw the Cathedral, the old Roman town, and the oldest Pub in Britain. It was a pretty nice p-day. I love band practice, but every once in a while it's nice to have a break. I took a bunch of pictures, so I'll attach some for you.

That's about it for this week! I hope you all have a wonderful week. Keep being the great I people I know you to be.

Love,

Elder Hein

Pictures:

2. St. Albans Cathedral