July 18, 2016

Wow so it was a pretty packed week, hopefully I can get everything in. To start, we had a really fun p-day last week. Our district as well as the zone leaders met at our chapel and we played basketball and ping pong. Me and Elder Bodeeletkasaem, from Thailand, had the most heated games but he's just a little bit better than me because he can curve it really well. Tuesday we had a good district meeting, everyone took pictures but I forgot my camera. :( We had an appointment with a new investigator Jackson, after talking to him a little bit we found out his grandma is the one who gave me 20$ a couple weeks ago while we were door knocking. Also he used to play footy (rugby) with a couple of new converts in our ward, we're hoping we'll be able to have a good member fellowship there and get Jackson's whole family interested. 

Overall we had a lot of appointments fall through, mostly because we had so many potential investigators but most of them fell through or turned out not to be interested. Me and my companion have resolved to start seeking out a lot more part member families and to build better relationships with the ward, since we don't know a whole lot of people.

Wednesday night we were about to visit a less active but on the side of the street we noticed a pretty nice couch hidden in a bunch of thrown out furniture. I guess I should explain by saying here in Brisbane they have a time of year where everyone throws out old TVs, furniture, random other crap they don't want but could be recycled out in front of their house, and the Council comes around and picks it all up. So for the last couple weeks we were looking in the many piles of stuff for a good couch we could put in our flat, since all we have in terms of furniture is our beds and a couple metal chairs. But anyways Wed night we finally found a pretty awesome couch that we were surprised someone wanted to chuck, but we called Napa and he came and helped us load it into his truck and take it back to our flat. So now we got a couch which is awesome, and we were able to teach the less active we were visiting as well. 

Thursday we had Nephi's baptismal interview. Other than that we had dropped appointments and some door knocking. Friday we had several more appointments fall through as well as weekly planning. It was also the day "it" happened. 

A lot of times on people's gates they have "beware the dog" signs, but there's usually one of 3 things: 1. there's no dog around, 2. the dog is just like a shitzu or maltese or some tiny dog, or 3. the dog is sitting right there barking at you before you even approach the gate. So in this case, we heard the dog barking from inside the garage, so we figured it was chilling in there, so we went in the gate and walked up to the door. By that time the barking had gotten quieter from the garage but then it got louder as this pitbull (we think) came around the other side of the house and running at us. Now, this has happened once or twice before, but usually the dog is pretty friendly and just runs up to sniff you a little bit and leave you alone. But THIS time, the dog was actually and LEGITIMATELY ANGRY. We start walking QUICKLY back to the gate and then the dog comes at me and bites my shoe so I was like DANG this dog's for REAL so we started to hasten our step towards the gate and I see the dog come at me again from behind out of the corner of my eye and OW the dog bites me on the back of the leg, right in the calf. Luckily it didn't hang on or anything, it was a quick chomp but it still hurt pretty bad. Luckily we got out before the dog could drag me back to its lair and surveyed the battle wound when we got back to the car. There was blood, there was bruising, but after bandaging it up with the car's first aid pack I valiantly volunteered we continue to knock the street, because surely no unhallowed hand could stop the work from progressing. As I limped, suffering, from house to house, it turned out that no one was really interested because there was some other guy door knocking as well collecting charity less than an hour before us, so people weren't all that keen to talking to us. One Irish lady, once we said the word "missionaries" cut us off and said "go away, and never, ever, come back" and slammed the door. 

But yeah, it's actually not too bad, I'll include some pictures but it's mostly healed now, just bruised and sore. We visited Jude and invited him and his family to Nephis baptism, and then visited a recent convert, sister Popata and they were talking to us about Pokemon Go.

Pokemon Go has taken over Australia. Almost everyone who we visit talks to us about it. It's ridiculous, I've already heard a couple of the crazy stories that have happened from people playing it. It's insane. Saturday was awesome, because a lot of people came to Nephi's baptism, even the McClures, Jude's family. I was blessed to be the one to baptize him. During the refreshments afterwards, Nephi's grandpa, who was present most of the time when we were teaching Nephi, stood up and gave a speech about how even though he's a Seventh Day Adventist we need more Christians in the world, and that he was proud of Nephi and thankful for us Elders for teaching kids to have good standards and morals. It was a pretty nice speech and overall it went really well. Sunday was good, we had a really productive ward coordination meeting, it takes such a huge burden off of missionaries shoulder's when ward missionaries are willing to do stuff. We visited Brother and Sister Atkinson who had invited one of their neighbors to have the first lesson and we also saw a couple other less actives. We had interviews yesterday, which is why we didn't email, but we got to meet the new president. He's really great, he's pretty knowledgeable. While we were waiting for our interviews we hung out for a few hours with the Narangba Valley and Burpengery Elders since our area was pretty far away from the Burpengery chapel. We had dinner with the Silvas, that was really nice but yeah I'm just about out of time so I'm gonna quick throw some pictures on here before I run out. Love you all

Elder Cummings

New Missionary training

2016 March Golden Orientation

This is a video of new missionary training soon after arriving in Australia.  In the physical training part of the video, if you look close, you'll see Calvin is either carrying his good shoes or wearing them.  He forgot to bring his tennis shoes to this part of their training.  He said he wore a hole in his socks from running in them. Oops.

July 10, 2016

This week sped by again, I think I'm getting to that point where people say the mission starts flying past. This week we were able to get a lot done as well. Monday and Tuesday we had a mini missionary from South Brisbane teach with us. He was really good at wanting to go out there and talk to people. For p-day we were going to eat at an authentic American restaurant but we didn't have enough time, so we just ate at McDonalds. 

Tuesday was interesting. Remember that guy who pulled up to us in his car and told us to come by? Well we finally caught up with him, he seemed really keen because he had lots of questions and had met with missionaries before in Enoggera, he had been starting to read the Book of Mormon again, but then things got weird when he started talking about how he had died and come back alive thousands of times and the government was breeding him so he had thousands of children, and that his roommate had tried to feed him one of them. Anyways he went on and on about this really creepy stuff but then Elder Evans asked if he had been diagnosed with any mental illnesses, to which he admitted to being criminally insane. So yeah that was probably the craziest experience of my mission so far. I'm not even sure if we'll want to see him again. He'll need help moving though, so we can do that.

Thursday we had trade-offs. I stayed in Bracken Ridge but one of the zone leaders, Elder Fao'logo worked with me for a day. He was really cool, he's 26 years old and already has a uni degree in computer technology or something but he was fun to serve with. We found one guy who just invited us in and we tried teaching him about our message and he kept connecting it to anime he had seen which was pretty funny but he invited us back which is good.

Nothing else that big happened this week, except for the fact we found 21 potential investigators which is the jackpot in this mission, we usually don't get any more than 8 or 9 a week. A few of them were pretty dodgy but some of them seem to be really solid. 

Nephi's baptism is this week, we're really excited for that, so we started getting to program together and I have confidence it'll go well. Nephi wants me to baptize him since I was one of the ones who started teaching him. 

So yeah it was a good week this week, unfortunately we didn't teach as many lessons as we wanted to but we worked our best. I've been reading Articles of Faith by James E Talmage in my free time, I highly recommend, it's a good read. 

Love Elder Cummings

Oh yeah one more thing, I weighed myself at Napa's house after exercise a couple days ago and I've gained almost 30 pounds in a couple months, even though I don't look any different, it's weird but yeah hopefully it's all muscle or something

July 3, 2016

Happy fourth of July! This week we were able to get a lot done and at the same time see our results kind of flop a little bit. We were able to teach a single mom, Samantha, a couple times and she told us she's determined to get baptized into our church she just needs to be sure it's the right thing, we taught her about how she can gain a witness from the Holy Ghost by reading the Book of Mormon so now she's a lot more committed to reading it. We've been trying to teach her for a month or two now but she being a single mom it's hard to find an adult male to come with us so we can get inside the house and sit down with her. Tonight we're planning on setting a baptismal date with her so we'll see how that goes. 

Tuesday we had zone meeting, which is always fun, there's this senior couple Elder and Sister Clyde, who always bring refreshments and stuff so they brought some cake and bagels and things. We door knocked into this lady my companion knew from his first area, she's not a member, although her partner is and so we talked with her a while, hopefully she'll be keen on taking the lessons. We tried saving kilometres on our car by biking around the neighbourhood most of the day but we easily used more than we saved when we went to pick up dinner from the members who had signed up to feed us. They lived up in the corner of our area in a really forested area so we got lost like three times trying to find their house.

Wednesday and Thursday we biked pretty much all day because we were just about out of k's to use on our car. So we were able to get a ton of contacts this week and a couple potential investigators, looking forward to see the results of that. When we were door knocking Thursday morning this guy drives up and calls out to us, I thought he was going to try to tell us the "truth" about Joseph Smith (which has happened many times) but really he wanted us to visit him, he told us he had the impression to turn down this random street that didn't lead anywhere and saw us. He figured it was no coincidence so he invited us to come see him. We were meant to see him the next day but as we were approaching his house we saw him pulling out of his driveway, luckily we left a card with our number and he called back and apologized and set another appointment for today. 

We taught Nephi a couple more times, he's pretty much ready. We taught Jude as well, but we'll have to move his date again because they're still not coming to church. Plus we taught him about tithing and he doesn't want to pay it because he doesn't think it's fair. So that could be a problem. We had an investigator drop us, which really stinks because he seemed really keen. Me and Elder Smith taught James a week or two ago, he prayed at the end of the first lesson, which never happens, and we thought he was going to progress really fast but when we went by to see him for the second time, he came out and told us he was never interested in the Mormon church and he admitted that he was just trying to manipulate us into coming to this course he attends where they talk about realizing their self-potential or something like that, it's really weird. I was pretty miffed but we were still nice to him and all. 

Guess I should also mention we got a mini missionary. He's just from South Brisbane but he's with us for a few days to see what missionary life is like. Yesterday we had to teach the gospel principles class because the Sister who was assigned for this week couldn't, because she wasn't feeling well, but she still came to class and was happy to sit with everyone else and kind of take over with her own comments and things. Sister Matila's a lovely Samoan but she often drags the lessons away so whoever's teaching has gotta try really hard to steer things back to the topic at hand before everyone gets carried away on whatever Sister Matila is saying. It's all good though, it's not a big deal. After church we went finding for a few hours, which was really productive with everyone being home. We visited one of our recent converts Anthony and shared a lesson with him about the temple. Afterwards as we were leaving we were telling him about how we wanted to go to an authentic American restaurant for the 4th of July, with it being a p-day, so he looked it up on his phone but apparently they're all in downtown Brisbane. Later he texted us about this other place in our area, so we'll see how that is.

The weather's generally been pretty cool, even a little chilly, except for the days we've spent finding most of the day, of course. Hope everything is going well with all of you. Probably one of the biggest things to change about me on my mission is realizing how slack I was in the gospel before coming out. I wasn't magnifying my callings, I wasn't living up to my responsibilities with the right attitude, and I wasn't committing myself to growing in knowledge upon knowledge until coming out here. Each of us, when we're judged, are going to have to stand accountable before God about how much we truly magnified the gospel in our lives rather than just going through the motions. Love you all and talk to you next week. 

Elder Cummings

June 26, 2016

Well, this week was an interesting one, but luckily even though it had it's share of downs it had a lot of ups as well. First of which is my new companion Elder Banks. We get along a lot better than me and Elder Smith did, we're constantly talking and getting to know more about each other and we teach in unity a lot better as well. He's really great and he helps out as much as he can, but being new to the area he can only do so much.

And that's where the difficult part comes in. With me leading the area, our progress took a dip. A significant one. I don't know what it was, it seemed to me like we were still planning and working the same as we did before transfers, but it just didn't work this week. We weren't able to teach a lot of lessons and our week as a whole kind of fell flat. But it's key to take these things as they come and learn from them, and that's exactly what I'm committed to do! I guess the first thing is to really strive to plan by the spirit. The other is to find new investigators. The simple truth is that we just don't have a lot of people to teach anymore. It seems like investigators and less actives left and right just aren't available anymore because of work, to just being slack and trying to hide from us when we come around, to finding out they have like 10 mental disorders, it's all over the place. So we're gonna do a lot more finding to fill up our plans with people to share the gospel with. 

Nephi is progressing really well, he's chugging along right up to his baptismal date on the 16 of July. We found out Matt Dragon is staying after all. Apparently one of the counsellor's in the bishopric called him and asked if he had even thought about the long-term of shifting to New Zealand, that kind of got him thinking, he had a prayer, and decided it wasn't the right decision right now. Which it's not my place to say which choice is the right one, but I'm really glad he's staying. I was afraid leaving would disrupt the great progress he's making to getting baptized later this year. 

Saturday we had a baptism for an ex-ed member, he and his wife moved in only a month or two ago but we've gotten pretty buddy-buddy with him. Sunday was interesting, after church we gave a priesthood blessing and later that day visited a less active member we door knocked into a few days earlier. She's really cool, she said she's always loved the missionaries, but she hasn't been to church in years because she doesn't like the ward. She wants to get her records transferred so she can pay tithing online though, so that was a cool surprise. She also had this super ancient bible that had been passed down in her family since the mid 1800s, it had this family record with all these signatures and birth dates of her ancestors, starting from 1847 or something. And it didn't just have the Old and New Testaments, it had engravings, diagrams, commentaries, and even an encyclopedia on different Christian sects. Found the one for Mormonism, it talked about how we practiced polygamy and stuff, it being a 150 year old bible, and then it made a poor attempt at discrediting the Book of Mormon, saying it came from a manuscript or something, and after that I wanted to chuck the Bible out the window but then I remembered that it's just an old Bible and it wasn't going to hurt anybody so I carefully put it back where it was. 

Other than that everything is going well, love you all and talk to you next week

Elder Cummings

June 19, 2016

Wowwwwww there's too much to say, where do I start? I guess first off we smashed our week. As a goodbye to President and Sister Henderson, everyone in the mission tried to hit their "hastening standard" for contacts (people we talk to either door to door or on the street). Since Elder Smith is a district leader, our standard is 175 contacts in a week, and Sunday we cinched it off at 182. Our hastening standard is also 8 member present lessons and we were able to get away with that as well. On Monday we had dinner with the Makata family, Sister Makata's husband hadn't gotten home from work yet, so she called over her neighbour to have dinner with us, he talked and talked to us about all the family history work he's done, he's not a member but he knows a ton about the different migrations of the ten lost tribes of Israel. It was pretty interesting until he started talking about how ISIS was created by the US government and all this other stuff. So that's when I kind of tuned out but he was friendly. 

We did some service for an old Chilean woman in our ward, Sister Antuar. She wanted us to cut down a tree in front of her house because it wasn't letting enough sun into her window to warm up her house. She made us a really good lunch to take home since we aren't allowed to have lunch appointments. We taught our young friend Nephi a couple times this week. We were able to set a baptismal date for July 16, so...hooray! Other than that we had several other lessons that didn't stand out too much. 

We got a couple new investigators which was awesome, one of them isn't too keen but he likes to hear what we have to say, but the other, James, has been WAY prepared. He doesn't have a super strong religious background but all he wants is greater direction in his life, which is exactly what the gospel provides! We even got him to say the closing prayer at the end of our first lesson, which is a rarity! Saturday night we found out Elder Smith was getting transferred, so on Sunday it was pretty sad too because THE coolest person I've met on my mission so far is moving back to New Zealand because his daughter is having her first kid. Everyone calls him Matt Dragon (including himself) I'm super sad because it was really sudden but he's already given away his car and a bunch of his furniture too, apparently. He's a super awesome and he's on track to get baptized later this year, so I'm really disappointed to see him go, but he's determined to bring his daughter and grand-baby dragon into the church so I hope that goes well. The rest of Sunday we went door knocking in the heavy rain for a few hours to reach our contact goal and then we visited a couple less actives and investigators we've been teaching for Elder Smith to say goodbye.

Last night we found out he's getting transferred to the Sunshine Coast to be a zone leader, and my new companion, Elder Banks, is getting transferred from Enoggera. This morning we all met at the church next to the temple at Kangaroo Point. I was able to talk to Elder Potter and Elder Adams, both of which are in the Chinese program but I knew them in middle/high school. Elder Banks is awesome, he's from Salt Lake City, Utah, and apparently we went to the same elementary for a couple years but were never in the same class, and he started going to a different elementary in 2nd grade. He worked at the Fairmont aquatics center as a lifeguard before his mission, and I used to love going there as a kid. Anyways, we've really hit it off just because we know a lot of the same places and things and definitely looking forward to serving with him. 

I'm a little apprehensive because even though he's the senior companion he's only been out a couple months longer than I have, and it's up to me to kind of show him around the area and lead in planning and teaching and stuff. I'm really nervous about that but I just need to learn to trust in the Spirit and let it guide everything we do. Love you all and see you soon (kind of)!

Elder Cummings

June 12, 2016

Thanks goodness we're on the last week of the transfer. Unfortunately we aren't going to have any baptisms other than the one we had the first week of this transfer. This week we had a really good zone conference. President Henderson gave a really good training about Joseph Smith and his experiences with the Book of Mormon, highlighting the mission mantra "Vision is paramount, obedience is the price, faith is the power, love is the motive" and how each of those things played into Joseph Smith's introduction to, obtaining of, translating, and publishing of the Book of Mormon. It was really insightful. Then President and Sister Henderson have some departing counsel since they'll be leaving at the end of the month. We were able to teach or less active friend Roy a couple times, his dads the branch president up in Mount Isa, which is waaaaay out in the bush, but he's recently become really interested again in coming back to church and learning about the Plan of Salvation. One of the members we had dinner with was the Farani family, Sister Farani forgot we were coming so she got us Subway sandwiches with ice cream and cookies for dessert. That's something we don't have enough of, haha. We've been continuing to teach Nephi, getting him ready to be baptized, but we need to talk to bishop to work out a couple things before we set a date. Church was good, that night we had splits with the mission prep class and we were able to teach 4 lessons, 3 of which were lessons to nonmembers, so we were just able to cinch our 8 lessons with members present goal. I went with two brothers Edward and Ethan Key. Edward's a ward missionary and he's come out with me and Elder Smith a few times, and we've had dinner with the Keys before. They're really cool. They were telling me about this thing I should try called a Tim-Tam slam, which I would love to explain but they don't have Tim-tams in the states. They're like these chocolate covered wafer sandwich things. This morning we had a mission-wide conference call and the mission president rebuked everybody because apparently there's a lot of companionships not getting up before 6:30, staying more than an hour at lessons/dinner appointments, not studying for specific investigators in the mornings, not setting enough back up plans for the day, etc etc. Me and Elder Smith are already super obedient so we tried thinking of some ways we could increase our obedience but we just resolved to staying more energetic throughout the day, since we're already super obedient anyways. Well that's about it, love you lots and talk to you later!

Elder Cummings