Well this is our first week back to just me and Elder Hausia. We taught Kaysan, one of our investigators who's on baptismal date a couple times about tithing and fasting. She's almost got all the lessons so we've just been trying to figure out how her and her partner are going to get married by the branch president and stuff. Trying to organize that. In Australia there's this weird law where once you fill out all the paperwork for getting married called an "Intent to Marry" and then you have to wait 30 days to actually get legally married. I guess it probably gives the couple time to figure out if they're related or if they don't actually want to get married. So no Vegas weddings in Australia, haha. But it makes it kind of annoying for investigators who want to get baptized and stuff but they have to get married first. It's a pretty common thing here. People don't like going through the hassle of getting married. Ezias's mom (we baptized him last week) started taking the lessons and she has to get married as well to her partner Joey. Joey's really cool, he's a less active member but he's really excited about coming back to church and their family has attended for the last couple weeks. He's a bodybuilder and stuff so he's really big. We set Ezias's mom on baptismal date so that was awesome though. We tried contacting one of our other investigators on baptismal date, Greg, but he disappeared for a few days. Luckily we got back in contact with him yesterday and committed him to stop smoking completely for a week.
Friday was rough. We had weekly planning, then we watched the recording of a mission conference they had back down south (since we're too far away they don't want to fly us down). We had an appointment with the investigator who told us he'd get baptized into the baptist church when we invited him to be baptized, but he dropped us when we went to his door. He said he didn't want to read the Book of Mormon in case it was full of lies, and he didn't want to risk being deceived with the Second Coming being so close. Of course we testified that we prayed and learned the BoM was true but he said no one could know until we get to heaven. We had an appointment with our branch mission leader, had dinner with some members, and our last appointment of the day was with Greg and he wasn't there, so we literally didn't get any lessons taught or contacting people done that day, and then the nonmember wife of one of our part member families said she didn't want the lessons anymore because our beliefs "aren't for her." Saturday we learned the branch president's wife passed away.
It wasn't too much of a surprise because she's been ill and on oxygen and stuff for years but it's still kind of weird that we had dinner at their house a few times and got to know her pretty well. She was originally from England and she was converted to the Church when she saw a couple missionaries at a bus stop and she ran over to them and basically asked them to teach her because she had so many questions.
That night the Innisfail branch hosted an activity called the Variety show, basically they did a bunch of singing and dancing. The Innisfail and Cairns branches had stuff, but for some reason our branch didn't participate this year. It was really fun though. And really well organized. They did it at a school and they had mics and a volunteer sound and lights crew so it was actually pretty impressive.
Sunday Ezias got confirmed (Elder Hausia did it) and we took a member with us on a couple lessons. Then we dropped him off and went to an young couple's house who've been investigating the church and the husband said he didn't want to see us around anymore. Random. But yeah I don't want to sound like a debbie downer but this week had some good highs but some pretty bummer lows. I haven't had 4 investigators drop us in a single week before. Plus Sister Bell's death hit the branch pretty hard. The closing hymn at church was "God be With You Till We Meet Again" and I looked up after the prayer and everyone excpet for us was in tears. They announced the funeral in sacrament meeting and I was wondering if it would be appropriate for us to attend (and if President Bell was even okay with us being there) because I haven't been to a funeral in years and years, but after church he asked us if we were allowed to attend funerals because his wife wanted missionaries to be the ones to carry her casket to the grave since they didn't have any sons. So that was pretty shocking and a pretty unique experience to have on a mission.
So yeah, that's our week. How was yours? Hopefully Halloween is fun. They don't really celebrate it here for some reason. I'll attach a clip from the Variety Show
Elder Cummings
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