September is Gone

October 2, 2013 

Hey!

Sorry about last week. We were just on lots of trade offs and had a few zone conferences and stuff, we were hardly in the office. It's been super fun though! All the new missionaries that have come in have been incredible! Things have been pretty stressful but I'm learning to cope with it now. I continue to grow and develop every day. I am becoming a much better leader and learning to be more charitable, patient, loving, and many other things. Because of the position I am in, we don't teach many of our own investigators, we mainly train missionaries so basically the missionaries are our investigators and we need to love them. I do love them all, I have so much fun with all of them and will really miss them bad when I have to leave. 

On Wednesday we took President and Sister Lew to Killaburger, the place with the 30 cm burger! They each ate 1/8 of the burger while Elder Haeata, Elder Puriri and I ate the rest of it hahah It was really fun. President Lew loves unhealthy food and he never gets fat because he is a skinny chinese guy and Sister Lew is always hounding on being healthy. It's really funny to see! 

Tonight we just got back from a missionary flat where we had to do some correcting. Their flat had an inspection and failed miserably. Food all over the place, chocolate all over the floor, rubbish everywhere, clothes strewn all over, cockroaches etc... There are 8 missionaries there right now and 6 of them have been out less than 3 months. They don't know how to take care of themselves. They are great missionaries, they just needed a kick in the butt in terms of being clean. We were loving toward them and helped them clean a lot of it up tonight but they were definitely reproved. There was a lot of love felt between everyone though. It went really well. I think this might be good preparation for parenting.. just realized that hahahah yikes! 

I am very happy to hear about all the Book of Mormon reading going on! I really miss reading the Book of Mormon as a family. I always use our family as an example of how great family scripture study can be. We didn't always read it but when we did, it makes a huge difference. Mom calls everyone up to read and we all are sluggish, don't want to stop watching our tv show or get off the computer or whatever else it is. Sometimes it takes like an hour to get everyone together but once we read and say our prayer in our knee circle.. it never seemed like everyone quickly rushed back to whatever they were doing. Usually we would all just stay in the living room and enjoy each others company. The spirit was there and the family love was magnified. Even though it was always hard to get everyone gathered up, it was always well worth it. I always share this experience with people that I teach and they all agree with it and can relate. I'm glad for when we could spend those times together. I realize now, that there is nothing more important that I could do. Even if I was over at a friends house, spending that time with my family would make me more happy. And I could always just invite those friend to come read with us :) haha If I was hanging out with a big group of friends and one girl said "I need to leave, my family is going to have nightly scripture and prayer" I would ask her if I could come with. That would be the girl I could marry! :) hahahahah not that I've been thinking about it.. ok that's a lie. I'm not working any less hard but I can't lie that I'm super stoked to find my EC (eternal companion).

 

That sounds like a crazy thing that you went to, Dad. I probably would have been exhausted to do all that. Sounds like a great activity. Maybe we should make all our missionaries do that! haha just kidding bad idea, our missionaries are way too injury prone. I swear it drives me crazy! Oh well what can ya do? Make them drink a cup of cement and harden up! 

Anyway, this letter has definitely been longer than last week. Hope you all have another great week. Don't have too much fun without me :) haha

Love, Elder Thompson