The Balance!

Bula!

Well we thought that this week would be a pretty free week but we ended up being in the office probably more than I have been at any other time... which was a pretty big bummer, but we got a lot of stuff done so it was good.  This week starts another few weeks of craziness. Tomorrow morning we are flying over to Labasa and we will have the first zone conference there, we will be there for most of Wednesday too so President can do his interviews with everyone and then we will fly back here to Suva on Wednesday evening, sleep here and then wake up and fly over to Nadi and do the 2nd zone conference there and all the interviews and stuff and then we will fly back here on Friday. Then next week we will have another 2 zone conferences here at the mission home for Suva and for Nausori. Then Zone leaders council the day after the zone conference, and then a intake of 16 a couple days after that..... awesome... haha it is going to be crazy but it will be awesome. It is fun to be busy and it will be good to get to be around all of the missionaries.

One of the things that we are doing for our training is about "the balanced effort". We are going to be starting off talking about what is the balanced effort in missionary work and how doing the balanced effort will bring us the best results, but also talking about what more we can do on top of that and taking "the next step" in always recognizing and following the promptings of the spirit. So we had the idea to do a visual thing where we actually have a balance and we put the stuff on there and see what happens. So this week we were running around all over the place trying to find anywhere that we could get a balance. We spent probably 45 minutes at the FNU nursing school one day talking to tons of different teachers and asking if they had a balance or knew where we could get one. Finally we concluded that we were just going to have to take matters into our own hands and make one ourselves. So we went to Vinod Patel (the wanna be Indian version home depot of Fiji) and bought a plunger, pvc pipe, fishing line, curry dishes, and a bolt and went back to the office. We found some tools and went to work (Elder Hogge had just gotten some complimentary hats from Courts and so we figured we would go official and wear the hats while we worked as you can see in the pictures haha) But the finished product is pretty amazing... we even found some gold spray paint and painted it gold. We are super stoked to use it in our training. It should be a good attention getter right after lunch haha. We also are doing this way cool thing where we have made these papers that people are supposed to respond to the questions, "who are you?" "What are you to the Lord, and what does he see in you?" and "What more can you do?" We also have a spot on there where me and Elder Stock have written a paragraph to each individual missionary and talked about some of the potential and good things that we see in them. It has been a ton of work and will still have a ton more to do but we think that it will be pretty awesome. I got the idea from some of the things that Elder Hamula shared with us when he was here for mission tour. He talked about really figuring out who we truly are, who we truly want to be or what our potential is, and then what more we can do to be that person. I am way stoked for it. I know that it has been good for me to think alot about it too as we have been preparing for it. I have a lot of things that I can do better with.

Well as far as our investigators go we are getting a lot of progress. Luke is still doing awesome. He is just facing a problem with his dad because his did is a talatala (minister) of another church and Luke hasn't really talked to him yet about coming to the LDS church or wanting to be baptized and stuff so hopefully his dad will soften his heart and Luke will feel like he can tell him about it because that is really the only thing holding him back right now. We are also teaching a guy named Koli. His wife and two sons were baptized last year by the sisters. He is progressing a ton too. It is fun to teach him because he really understands things fast. We asked him about Joseph Smith and he already knew a ton of things about him and said how he love the LDS church because he says we are the only church that lives what we preach and actually follows the example of Jesus Christ. That is why we really have to be careful of what we do and really be good examples of living the gospel because people will notice and it will either have a great impact on them for good, or could have a big negative impact on them as well. I think that it is way awesome that you guys have had all of those missionary experiences lately and even been able to specifically teach some of the lessons to your friends. There is nothing better in my mind that you could do better to serve a mission than to start now to not be ashamed of the Gospel of Christ and to share it with others. Keep it up!

Well sorry this is a little bit of a short email. I am going to try to send you guys some stuff soon. Nothing big at all, so don't get too excited haha Au lomani kemudou!!!

Loloma, Elder Hawk