An AWESOME Week - Elder Joshua Avery

 By Elder Joshua Avery, serving in the Singapore Mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, speaking Mandarin Chinese.

This week Elder Avery sent a voice recording and several photos. The following is transcribed from the voice recording:  

Alllrighty!  I’m a little short on time, so I’m going to have to do this AUCTIONEER style….

Just kidding, I won’t be an auctioneer, I’ve never done that... But Monday was an AWE-SOME day.  After our preparation day activities, we went out proselyting and we ended up being able to talk to some awesome people and we found a really cool potential investigator, we went to see a less active, the less active wasn’t home and then his son was, turned out the less active moved somewhere else. The son was willing to let us share share with him later, but so far he’s flaked out on his appointments, because he’s scare what his wife will think, so we just have to get him to be less scared.

Then Tuesday, was an exciting day, we ended up having our zone meeting that day, and our zone meeting was amazing and really powerful. So we went out and had an awesome day, found some cool people that we were able to set up for later. One of which was, while we were walking, Elder Harker he saw this park and he said, we have to go the park and talk to people at the park. So we’re like, "Okay". So we went to this park that was by this member’s house and we talked to some people that were saying “no” but we saw this old lady and we talked to this old lady and she was like “Hey! I’m from the Philippines and I’m Mormon and I used to be a temple worker in the Manila temple and we’re like “What the... like, who are you?” So then she’s like “yeah, yeah, and I live right here”  She's been here for like a month or two, and she had no idea where the church was in Singapore or anything like that. So going to that, we were able to teach her son-in-law who was home, who’s not a member and we taught him and he had a couple of concerns, but he was pretty good. But he also ended up skipping his return appointment, well I guess technically, it was his first appointment so he ended up skipping that, so we’re going to have to try to reschedule with him and try to catch him one of these times, but it was an awesome miracle.

Then Wednesday, we ended up having a lesson with Sister Em*, she’s the Indonesian that we found a couple weeks ago and she’s just cruising towards baptism she accepts everything, we taught her the law of chastity, the word of wisdom and all sorts of things and she just eats it right up. She just follows it without any question, which is just AWESOME and so… and we even taught her about modesty, which like no one in Singapore cares about and she’s committed to modesty. Like, that is amazing.  If we could get our other recent converts, to dress modestly, then we’d be getting somewhere.  So and we also found 8 potentials that day, so that was a really great finding day, had an awesome lesson… really, really good.

Thursday after our weekly planning, we went out and had a lot of lessons scheduled, some of them fell through, but the highlight of the day definitely was teaching Annabelle, which she’s doing good. After that we ended up teaching the Stake Patriarchs wife a lesson, she’s been investigating a really long time and I guess this sounds weird, because people don’t understand. So how this is working.... um, the stake patriarch married a member and then she passed away a couple years ago so now he’s remarried, but she is not a member and she’s pretty stubborn like “I’m not going to join the church for like, my husband, or anyone like, only if God lets me know if it’s true".  And so this past week, she says that she feels like it’s true and  she wants to be baptized. Only concern now is that she’s scared to give a talk or accept a calling and she and her husband are talking about it and they’ll let us know about the baptism date.  It will either be this month or September.

Then, after that, on Friday, we ended up teaching sister S*, she’s doing really well.  Then Saturday, we had a lot of potential lessons, we were sad because they all fell through, except for one. Um but he was way awesome. His name is R*, and he is from Myanmar, but his English is amazing. He’s been here for a really long time, so his English is completely normal.  And he is a Buddhist, but open and willing to learn. We taught him about the restoration and he understood it really well and he’s like “so, pretty much what you’re saying is that your religion has the connection between like what your religion teaches and God and others, it’s just like beliefs”  and we’re like, "yep, that’s pretty much it” so he’s like “Wow, okay, I’ll read this book and pray about it” so we’re meeting him on Wednesday, I’m excited about him. He wants to come to church next week.

And then, Sunday was another good day, we had (yawns) quite a few investigators at church and then another really cool thing that ended up happening was earlier this week was on Wednesday, I forgot to say something, so on Wednesday we went and got together with Brother Y*, he’s a recent convert that we’re teaching, so we went to go in and share with him and as soon as we’re about to start the lesson, we get a call from one of our investigators who’s name is G* and G*, for a while, we were meeting with him. He’s a really nice guy, had a good spirit, but he just wasn’t able to progress because of his working situation and he finally got a new job, so we’ve been able to share more with him the past couple weeks and then all of the sudden, we just get this call from him: “Elders I need to get baptized like right away”. And we’re like, “What?”, and he’s like, “Yeah, like as soon as I can, I need to be baptized”, and it was way exciting, and so we talked to him about it on Saturday, and he scheduled for baptism on the 17^th of September and then Em*s on the 18^th and then the patriarch’s wife, should be sometime before then, which is really cool, so then baptisms are coming up, but we need to find some people. 

Our finding has been down, so that’s always hard, because finding is the life-blood of missionary work. Baptisms are awesome, but if you don’t find, you don’t baptize. So we’re a little stressed about finding right now, but we’re gonna keep goin' strong!  Great day ahead... and next week, when I talk about all the crazy awesome finding miracles and awesome investigators we have, just know it’s because God loves us and He likes to test us and this was the testing week, so I hope this next week is the miracle week.  Awesome. 

Love you all!
Elder Avery

Stake Conference and New Friends - August 28, 2016

Learning Malay with Elder Harker and Elder Gara - August 14, 2016