Towards the end I was like
Goal: go on a date
Goal: get good grades in college.
It was really weird to think that I will have to do that stuff this year.
Anyway I still am on my mission and am focusing on it. Boy do I love this new area. It was so hard at first to get used to it and overcome missing Gold Coast but I can say I am going to love this area just as much.
It is a poor area compared to Gold Coast so just in the 2 weeks that I have been here we have seen so much success. People love to hear the gospel here. I am covering 2 wards so it makes it tricky trying to figure out who is who and where is where but I know the main roads and can drive around fine right now. The people range from white to islander. Mostly islanders. So we are getting fed a feast every night. The meal calendar is never empty. I hope to put on some weight. Heaps of weight. Haha I am skinny.
My comp is named Elder Aspacio. He is from the Philippines. At first I did not like him and thought he was going to be hard to work with. The first week was hard because of leaving GC and having Elder Lim but that has passed and I am loving being with him now. We have our fun moments and our quiet ones.
We do heaps of finding so I have lots of fun things to write about what happened while we were out. My favorite thing that we do together is come up with a word to say at the door as we knock. We started with A and then B and so on.
A= Aligator
b= Bannana
c= Cockroach
d= dinosaure
e= eggplant
f= farmer
That is as far as we got and boy was it so funny and made door knocking way more fun. We were less awkward at the door and it made for good conversations. Some of the best were, "Hey I saw a huge cockroach on your driveway." The lady said, "Oh no that is not good." She looked so scared.
I said to a lady after she said not interested, "Do you know your plants very well. I was wondering if that was an eggplant tree?" I about lost it in laughter when I said it. It was very obvious that it was a mango tree. haha she must have thought I was so dumb. It was so funny.
Elder Aspcio asked a lady after we talked to her if she knew a farmer. She pondered it for a while and he replied with "the farmer family, we are looking for them." haha I bet this seems really cheesy but man we were having a hay day. It was so funny. Door knocking gets so long and boring some times. It is the same thing every time. This game made it really fun and unique to good conversations.
The biggest miracle we had this week, ok wait we had a few. The coolest one was after a long street of rejection we came to a house that was having a party with a heap of YSA. A kid answered the door and was not interested one bit but we asked if anyone inside was. NO!! Then he shut the door. After moving on to the next house a girl came running out of the house asking if we were the religious people. After she came out and got our attention we started to get to know her and began to teach her about Heavenly Father's love for her. I guess that last week was pretty hard for her and she prayed for help and then we showed up. I felt for her because last week I had a pretty hard one too with exactly the same things she was going through. Anxiety and stress. I talked about how much prayer has helped me and I asked if she thought we were an answer to her prayer. “YES,” she said. It was amazing. We got her number and are going to start teaching her at the chapel. Her name is Beth. She is just wonderful and so prepared.
Another door knocking miracle that happened was while we were playing our game. We were on the word banana and it was Elder Aspacios turn. We knocked into a Filipino and she started to talk with him. While they were conversing in Tagalog I heard the word bananas and he looked at me with the biggest grin. I don’t know what he was saying but he said banana. Haha this lady is named Arlene. She is wonderful too. There was a bench out on her front lawn so she invited us to share a message with her on it. She just moved over and was in contact with the elders over there. Well long amazing story cut short, Elder Aspacios taught her in Tagalog and I taught in basic English and she accepted to be baptized on Feb 17. She was so excited and it was so amazing!!
In this area there are heaps of families that come to church or are sorta less active with 9 to 10 year old kids that are not baptized. We have started to go around to all of them and teach them and their kids.
The Martin family is one in particular. The parents are not active but they love having the elders over. We have seen them a few times this week and on our last visit we talked about the importance of baptism and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. After a great lessons their son Kelehn accepted to be baptized on Jan 20.
It has been a week full of miracles. I am so excited to be here and love it so much!!
We had a big meeting called MLC where all the zone leaders get together to be accountable and come up with fun new ideas and plans.
One quick side note was last year in the meeting we set a goal of the ABM 500 for 2017. 500 convert baptisms. Well on December 31 at 5pm we were at 499 with no more planed for the evening.
One of the stake presidents heard about it and felt so sorry that we all worked so hard and came so close. So he grabbed the sister and they started visiting all the families they could with unbaptized children. At 7 pm they found a family that was coming to church and had a 9 year old not baptized. So he and the sister taught a lesson and invited the family and kid to be baptized that night. So at 8 pm new years eve we hit our mission goal of 500 baptisms!!! Haha it was so crazy!!!
At our big meeting we talked about how to take it to the next level by being accountable and using the stake and ward leaders.
So we came up with a way to be accountable daily to our zone and ward/stake. It involves everyone in the zone having a zone calling and responsibility. It makes our load lighter and gives the missionaries a sense of love and trust.
The callings consist of gathering all contacts for the day. Sending out a fun fact of the day. Scripture text. Diligence points, Member presents at 20 other lessons at 10 and contacts are 1. This means we are measured on what we can control. They are the only numbers that we measure that are not affected by the investigators agency.
This week went amazing for it. Everyone loved it and it has been so fun to see the work hasten. This church is so true and great!!
To end this amazing email I have a fun thing that happened today. We have a senior couple in our zone and they are pretty old. We love them but they are a bit slow and take their time for things. Yesterday in our zone meeting Elder Stokes found out I love tennis. He invited us to play with him today at 7 am. I thought why not. It will be fun to play and beat this old guy!! Well I got one part of that right. I was having the best time playing tennis. I’ve missed it so much. I just loved it. To my surprise I was not that bad but to my greater surprise he was not that bad too. In our warm up I started to see that this guy meant business. During the game he did not hold back. You would not believe how fast this old guy moved. He could hit hard too. It ended up being a really fun match. We did not keep score but he won for sure. I was all over the place. We both loved it so much that we are going to do it every Wednesday morning at 6:30.
What a week it was. So amazing. I love you all so much. Happy New Year. Cheers.
Love,
Elder Cahoon
Calling home
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