Progress

Halo Keluargaku,

The first week with my new companion (my "son" as we say in the mission) has been totally awesome. He's a great elder and I think in these last few days we've been working harder than ever and are really starting to see a lot of progress in the area. So, I'm super excited and I think he is too.

I have a huge announcement! I finally ate the first durian I liked :D! Ta-da! It's kind of a major rite of passage in the mission to finally like durian, so I feel like this is a big step forward. Poor Elder Whittaker though, I think there is a lot of culture shock in the first couple of weeks and I haven't taken a lot of mercy on him. He's been really good though, a total trooper and he's adjusting fast. He even managed to get down some of the durian without losing his composure.

The work is going awesome! This last week we were able to put two new solid-looking investigators on baptismal date, so we're starting to think before long at all we're going to start seeing more baptisms come out of this area. We're both feeling really motivated. It's been awesome to see Elder Whittaker come into the field with that MTC fire and I think things are going to start turning around fast here. We're still seeing miracles happen in the work here all the time which is a huge blessing and a great motivator to keep at it.

This last week we were contacting near to our apartment, just getting ready to get home when I stopped one more person before we turned in. He turned out to be Christian and actually was willing to meet us the next day, so, when the time came we headed out to go find him. He actually wouldn't give us his phone number, but his house turned out not to be too difficult to find which turned out to be a huge blessing in itself. So, we sat down with him, one friend, and his wife and had an absolutely awesome lesson. His wife espcially was looking very eager to learn more which was super great, until we found out that she and her husband were going to "camp" that very day and would be gone for at least three months. The other friend would be leaving in a few days more. Garbage! But, hoping to get something out of it, we asked if they had any friends we could meet. The first two said no, but the third told us we could come back around 4 and he'd take us to go meet a friend. So, we went pretty far away to go tracting, ate, and, I'll admit, by the time 4 came around I'd totally forgotten we were supposed to go meet our new friend. Well, we ended up (not really by coincidence I think) deciding to go visit an investigator who lived close by this guy and ran right into him sitting on his front porch. We turned out not to be too late so he still took us out to meet his friend (who lived in the far away area we'd just come from :D). Well, in short it turns out this almost-forgotten referral turns out to be awesome, and we actually even put him on date to be baptized the very first time we sat down with him, something I've never done before. So, the Lord is in this work and he's watching out for us. Good to know we're not alone.

Anyway, these kinds of things are happening all the time. We're going to succeed here in Tawau and I feel so blessed to get to be a part of it!

Love you all so much!

Elder Blissett