Saturday, April 19, 2014

Letter from Elder Meyer: This is just home (Q7).

Hello Everyone

Things have been pretty good. We taught a lot of people this week it was a lot of fun.

Sorry about the letter last week, I don't have the rest. I am not sure where it went. I hope you get it all this time.


Dad

Sounds like the game was a lot of fun. I am not sure how much I would have enjoyed that. 20,000 people are a lot of people. I don't think that would be to fun for me. The Elder that fell of was half Tongan and half Samoan. I never met the elder, but it is still really really sad. I couldn't imagine how his companion is feeling, let alone the parents.  Glad you enjoyed Switzerland. That is really fun that you sat next to the brother of Brother Wooley. Crazy how small the world really is. Yes my mission is tough. Don't worry. It is work is hard, and there are many problems on the island that we as missionaries face, but I don't like to focus on that. That stuff is boring. The exciting stuff is on the success that we have. I guess that is why I don't share the hard things going on. I don't like to talk negative about things or people. I just like to keep things positive.


Question 1: How is the zone doing?

Answer: We are doing pretty good. It is a little hard being a zone leader. Everything that goes wrong comes straight to us.

Question 2: What made you smile this week?

Answer: The baptism we had. It was great. The boy’s name is M*ckey. He is super awesome. And we have the same birthday, May 26th. It was funny when we found that out. We are going to celebrate our birthdays together.


Question 3: How many lessons and with member's present? –

Answer: we had 27 lessons this week, and 15 with a member present. It was an awesome week.


Question 4: Now that you're in Colonia, have you met with any island visitors?

Answer: I actually don't teach in the city, I am just in the Colonia branch.  The city is the sister’s area. I am still teaching in the village. So I still don't see many tourists.


Question 5: How does someone get to be an island chief?

Answer: They are borne into it. It runs in the family. If your dad was the chief, when he dies, if you are the oldest son, you will be the next chief, it will forever stay in that family unless they all die.


Question 6: Are any of the young men on the island planning to serve missions?

Answer: Yes several of the recent converts go teaching with us all the time. They want to serve a mission. And a couple boys from Thool would like to serve as well.

Question 7: Do you remember your first week on the island... compared to now, what has changed the most for you?

Answer: I can remember the first week fairly well. At first everything was new, now this is my life.
The people, the surroundings, it is home to me. Not being able to speak to the people in their native language, and now being able to. It is awesome. At first I felt that I was in a strange land, I loved it, but it was strange, now I just feel like I am home.


Mom

Note: This letter was lost in the email message…  combining two letters into one.

I am glad that you had fun teaching with the sisters. I know that they really loved your help. That is good that they were bold. If they were not members already, did they invite them to be baptized? We are supposed to, on the very first lesson!!! Keep working with the sisters. I know that you can help them. You know like everyone in Chico.


Question 8: Tell about church this week.  Anything unique happen? –

Answer: Well, church was good. I am teaching the youth Sunday school class. They are a crazy group of kids, but I love helping them. Nothing super unusual happened. Well, there was almost nobody at church yesterday. There is this huge tournament going on for basketball. It killed the work for the week, and it killed church attendance. I am hoping that it will end soon, but I don't think it will.


Question 9: Tell about a tender mercy this week.

Answer: We are teaching a boy named And*rson. He doesn’t' go to school. He is 19 and stopped while in 3rd grade. Not good. He has seizures if he thinks too much about things. We taught him the entire restoration, and it caused him to have a seizure. Then we found that he gets them. The dad still let us come back. He was not mad at all. So we are still working with him. Just taking it really slow.


Question 10: Describe a time you felt the spirit this week.

Answer: I felt the spirit when we were teaching And*rson. He is such a good kid, and is so eager to learn. He wants to do the best he can, and you can tell by the way that he talks and listens. Every time we are there, the spirit is there helping him learn.


Question 11: Describe a lesson this week that someone asked something unexpected.

Answer: Every Friday night we do a sports night at the church and play basketball. One of  the investigators of the sisters, was there. We taught him for a while, but now he lives in their area. He was just taught about the law of chastity. And this guy has a challenge with that commandment. He came up to me and asked if it was okay for him to break that commandment once a month. I just kind of smiled and tried to teach him more. We talked for a little while. It was a bit funny.


Question 12:  When you study the Book of Mormon, are you studying in Yapese or English?

Answer: I study in both languages. I am almost done with the Book of Mormon in English, then I am really going to focus on the Yapese again.


Question 13:  Did you try some food that I would think would be unusual?    Answer: I had some squid this week. It was all right. It is not very fishy. I was quite surprised.


Question 14: What was in the last package you got?   Answer: I got a lot of jerky and the huge thing of tootsie rolls. The kids really loved those.



Letter to Everyone



Alright, this was a really good week, accept for the fact that one of the elders in the mission died in an accident. President asked to be 100% obedient, because the rules keep us safe. He also asked us to move the work even faster, in the name of the Elder. We are all said because of his death. As far as I know, this is the first death of a missionary in this mission. You never know when your time is up; you just always need to be ready.

Let’s see... Elder Ramiterre and I had a baptism It was really great.

The sisters had a baptism as well, and the Elders in the Thool area.

It was great. That was 3 in one week. We need to get to more to reach our goal for the month. As of right now, we have 8 baptisms this year… that is really good. I think that we can reach our goal of 45 for the year. It is a big goal, but we are doing pretty good. We need to work harder and faster to get the goal though. My goal is to have 25 for the island before I go home. That is about half of the goal, and I leave about half way through the year. But I don't want to talk about that. We are doing pretty good.

The three people that were baptized are named M*ckey (mine) N*chele (sisters) and T*m (Thol). The baptismal service down here was pretty good. It was really nice and the spirit was there. M*ckey is a really good kid. His dad was not going to sign his baptismal record. We went to go talk to the dad, we explained what it was and how it all worked. He said that he didn't want anything to make his son upset because he is carrying a lot of burdens because of his mother’s death. I talked to the dad about the atonement and how it works. The dad signed the paper, and he was baptized. I talked to M*ckey on Friday about how the atonement can really help him feel less burdened from is mother’s death. I told him to pray and ask heavenly father to take the burden away when he was baptized. After the baptism we talked with him. He said that he feels so so so much better that the burden is so much lighter. It made me feel happy. I know that he is going to to good. He has a strong testimony.

Could you please send some little consecrated oil containers. There are a lot of people that have the priesthood, and would like to give blessings, but nobody has the container to hold the oil. That would be great. Also do you think that you could send the best two years video? The young men would really like to watch it. I told them about it, and they want to watch it.

I love you all so so much

I am trying to send pictures, but the internet will not attach them. Time is almost up, but I will keep trying

Love you all so so much
You are the best

Love
Elder Meyer


No comments:

Post a Comment