Hey Everyone!
This week was amazing!
On Saturday, I went on splits with one of my Zone Leaders-Elder
Cashen(he is from Arizona)(he is the man). We had originally planned
on going to the Family History Center right after lunch to help one of
the recent converts(Alavena) to find the names and do the work for her
mother and father, but we found out that its closed on Saturday. So we
had about 4 hours of time that we didn't have anything planned. But I
took the CMIS list that has all of our members names and addresses and
went to find all the members starting from the bottom name going up.
My companion has already visited some of them so we started from the
last page figuring that they started from the first. So it was like
one of the hottest days on Saturday since I've been here and we were
just walking around trying to find our members and update the list. A
couple of people moved and another changed back to his old church and
a lot of people weren't home. It was hard. But it was totally worth it
because we came in contact with about 20 people that aren't members.
Our Mission President told us that it takes about 7 good contacts with
nonmembers for them to want to start taking the missionary
discussions. We even sat down with these 2 former investigators(we
were looking for a member and just asked them if they knew them and
they invited us in. Apparently 2 sister missionaries used to teach
them) but they are super nice! The man, Josefa, lived in California
for like 3 years! And the wife was super nice. She is a Sunday school
teacher at one of the Methodist churches. But we just shared a
spiritual thought with them from Matthew and after the lesson I had
asked if they had a Book of Mormon. They said they used to, but didn't
know what happened to it. I gave them the one I was carrying around
all day and just bore my testimony with them that I knew the book was
true and that it could help them in their lives(I wanted to give a
Book of Mormon to at least one person that day, so I made it a goal to
put it in somebody else's hands by the end of the day and just carried
it in my hands all day until we sat down with that family). We were
getting ready to leave their house when Josefa asked us where we would
be for Christmas so we told him we would be here in Fiji. He then
invited us to come over for lunch on Christmas Day haha. They also
said to come over whenever we want. Not sure if they are super
interested, but they are super nice.
Then on Sunday we had 113 people come to church! Which is really good,
we normally have about 60ish people come. A lot of less active members
came to church. Hopefully we can just help them see the need to come
every single week to partake of the sacrament. Really grateful for my
mission and the time I have to serve, it truly has been an amazing
experience so far and I've learned so so much. Can't wait to continue
to learn and grow!
Take Care, Loloma levu!
Elder Beilman
