Wow, so it's been quite a while so there's a few things to catch up on. Last time I wrote we drove around the whole day getting videos of missionaries for a Christmas gift for the McSwains from us and the assistants. We just took clips of heaps of missionaries saying what they were thankful for in the McSwains. We just kind of travelled around to random areas we thought would be good to get the missionaries' input. It was kind of funny, the first area we went to was my first area, Bracken Ridge and we caught the Elders there sleeping in.
It's been a lot of office work over the last week and a half. A lot of crunching numbers for end of year stuff. Plus we've also got to submit an annual mission history to the church so we've been compiling stuff for that. On Sunday Christmas Eve we had just sacrament meeting with Bunya Forest, the other ward that meets in the same building. I used to serve in Bunya Forest so I got to see a few of the members there I was friends with. Later that day we were splitting off with the assistants for some reason (I can't remember why) and me and Elder Hymas (who used to be my companion) went door knocking to kill some time. It had been FOUR MONTHS since I had been door knocking. Previously I had never gone without door knocking for one or two days at the most. I was soooooo rusty at it. I wasn't nervous about getting back into it but when people would answer the door my mind went BLANK. I managed to clumsily ask a couple questions about Christmas Eve before lapsing into sounding like Elder Robot or something.
We had dinner at the mission home with the assistants and President and Sister McSwain, which was really fun. Had some New York steaks, then we watched the Christmas Devotional, and lastly we exchanged some gifts. President and Sister McSwain got us sweet as ties with kangaroos on them as well as a bag of jerky. We showed them the video we made with all the missionaries and they really liked it.
Christmas was super fun. We started with breakfast at the Amos', they're probably my favorite family in the ward. Sister Amos gave us socks with cool designs on them. Our bishop invited us for breakfast but we couldn't make it because we had to be at the office to call home. There were a couple other elders there and I had to help a Filipino elder figure out how to call internationally on the telephone since he couldn't skype. And then a couple of the elders who WERE skyping couldn't get their mics/cameras working so I can never catch a break from the tech support :) haha.
After calling home we had lunch/dinner at the Tilyards. The wife is Tongan but the husband is Australian. The husband actually just got baptized a couple weeks ago after investigating the church for 30+ years and he's awesome as a member. They had a huge Tongan feed. My companion was super excited because they had heaps of seafood, such as prawns, lobster, oysters, and even this octopus sauce stuff. I settle for the prawns and lobsters. Oysters are really slimy going down and I didn't even want to risk the octopus stuff.
Thursday was MLC. Oh yeah, on Monday this guy came in with a suitcase and he's like "hey, uh, this is missing baggage for sister so-and-so." A sister's suitcase had gotten lost on the flight over, and several days earlier we had gone to the airport to get it when they found it, so we were confused when this guy came in with another one for the same sister. My companion took it but it wasn't until the guy was long gone that we looked at the flip flop tag on the handle and realized there was a name on the other side. IT WAS NOT THE SISTERS NAME. The phone number was American too! So it sat in the office for a few days because we weren't sure what to do with it, and no one answered the phone number. But we decided to take it back to the same place we picked up the missing luggage from and hopefully they'll be able to get it to whoever's it was.
Friday was temple day! After that our zone had interviews, but being in the office we don't really have interviews since we see President all the time, but while they do interviews each transfer they have a senior couple pull the missionaries who are going home soon into a room to do a slideshow training about things like "life goals" and "careers" and "schooling," which are totally foreign concepts to missionaries, of course. And you guessed it, as I was trying to sneak away Sister McSwain was like "wait a minute, Elder Cummings! Aren't you going home soon? Why don't you go in with the Yates for their workshop." I tried getting out of it, but failed.
Sunday night, new years eve, we had dinner at the mission home again, with the assistants and also a couple of the best senior couples in the mission, the Clydes and the Bells. We had some awesome prime rib and baked potatoes for dinner and then played rummikub until midnight. There weren't that many fireworks (because they're illegal in Australia unless you have a really hard-to-get commercial license) but it was so fun spending time. The other missionaries in the mission had to be back at their flats at 5:30 but being in the mission office team has perks B)
Oh yeah, something that was really cool that happened was a baptism on Sunday. Our mission set a goal at the beginning of the year for 500 convert baptisms. We got to this weekend and we had 9 baptisms lined up, putting us exactly at 500. Unfortunately one of those 9 investigators' sisters got really sick and had to get emergency flown to the hopsital and wanted her sister to be with her. So there we were, Saturday night with 499 baptisms. But Sunday (last day of the year) the Logan stake president got word about it and visited a Tongan family with an unbaptized child who had been coming to church for the past year and challenged him to be baptized that night. It actually went through! The attendance and program went much better than many baptisms that have been in the works for weeks. We got to go, President and Sister McSwain came, the assistants were there, as well as the whole Logan zone. It's a mission miracle! Go Polys :D
Yeah, that's pretty much all caught up. It was the mission secretary's birthday so we surprised her by decorating her desk to surprise her when she came in. So that's one of the pictures. Another is at the Tilyard's when I was drinking a coconut. The one of the car dash was on Christmas day, it was 31 degrees celsius (88 farenheit) and that's not even the hottest it got. And then one Sister McSwain took of me and Elder Sharma after MLC finished. And yeah. Golden Orientation is this week so that'll be fun. Cheers mate!
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