New Missionaries

Halo Keluargaku,

Yes! I did get the cookies! Thank you *so* much! I couldn't believe when Brother Doxey walked up to me on Sunday and said, "Hey, I just talked to your mom." How exciting! He even passed on a hug from you, so I appreciated that too :D. The cookies were awesome. We shared them with the sisters last night while eating some nice curry from a recent convert. It turns out cookies make an excellent desert after a nice plate of curry. Who would have guessed?

So thank you so much, and thank Sister Paulsen too! The CD she sent is really awesome. I have to confess, a lot of my favorite Mormon Tabernacle Choir songs are the songs where just the men sing, so I was really excited to get a whole CD of that. Awesome!

I started watching some of those Mormon Messages. They're awesome! It's funny, I like them so much, but I actually haven't even seen most of them I'm discovering. It's so convenient to have on a DVD, and I think we're actually even going to try and use them with some investigators. We were going to show one during a training we gave yesterday, but unfortunately we couldn't find a DVD player. Oh well...

So, this last week was pretty awesome. We actually spent three days of it in Singapore, which is never the best for our area, but we did get a lot of awesome training, and we got to meet all the new missionaries coming into our Zone! That's right, new missionaries! We just got a new batch in from Provo and Elder Peterson and I were very pleased to see that about half of them were coming into our zone. That means the KL zone, which was already the biggest in the mission, is now a monster zone of around 20 missionaries! I don't know about other missions, but that's pretty unheard of here (it's about a fourth of all the missionaries in the mission), so we're really excited. Just so you can keep an eye out on missionary mom, the new missoinaries in our zone are Sister Chang, Elder Bryant, Elder Christensen, and Elder Browne. They're all awesome, and we're very excited to have them.

New missionaries actually leads me to our next bit of exciting news, which is that President just received the official word last week that our complement of missionaries is being upgraded from 82 to 100. Woohoo! 100 missionaries! Rumors were flying like crazy about the new areas that they'll open up, but apparently we're supposed to be up to 100 by August, so we'll know soon enough! It'll be interesting to see whether they actually make it to 100 by then considering that we have 26 missionaries going home within three weeks of each other at that same time, but we'll see! I guess the final break down will be 16 native Malaysian missionaries, 14 sisters, 10 mandarin speaking missionaries, and 60 Malay speaking missionaries. Very, very exciting!

So, lots of exciting Singapore mission news. We're moving up in the world, and it's awesome to see the Kingdom of God developing here so rapidly. This is a very, very exciting time to be in this mission.

Not that I'm counting, but as of today I have six months left in the mission field (not that I'm counting :D)! Don't worry, I'm still very focused and working very hard. I love it here a lot!

Anyway, I think that's the bulk of the exciting news this week, except that on Sunday we have another baptism coming up! She's actually another Iban, and the younger sister of one of the recent converts we just barely baptized, so we're super excited. It's so much easier when people have family in the church. That support is so key to keeping our recent converts active and doing well. This last Sunday we helped the Branch President translate to have an interview with our other Iban recent converts *** and ***, but we were pleasantly surprised to see that they spoke a lot more English than we thought, and didn't even really need us! Anyway, they're lined up to get callings, and *** will be sustained to receive the Aaronic priesthood on Sunday! Yippee! I was so proud of them to hear how well they did in the interview. They're awesome.

I love you all so much! Thanks so much again for the cookies! Glad to hear that everything is going well at home (John's new calling is so exciting! There's so much potential to do good in the Elder's Quorom Presidency. That's really awesome, he's going to do a great job). Give Johnny a big hug for me!

Love you so much!

Elder Blissett