10 October 2016

Dear fam and friends,

This has been a good week out in here. LOTS of biking but thank goodness my bike is holding together. (hope it can bertahan sampai akhir for me) This week has been a great week of learning how to work with the branch I am working with here. It has been really nice to work in a place where a majority of callings and responsibilities are filled. It really gives me joy to think about the willingness of God to perfect us through our works. Anyway, this week, one of our areas has hundreds of people living on government land and they all have to move because the government wants its land back so this week, a little bit of last week , and some weeks to come, we will be doing EVERYTHING WE CAN to get the branch involved in getting over there to help them get moved over to the new area. That will be great. If that all works out, there will be such a great unity created. Oh I hope it works out.

We have been having a lot of fun in our work. It always starts off slow in a white wash but you always learn a ton. One focus of what we were trying to do this week was be more personable with people when we talk to them. Like trying to make a personal connection. Actually something kind of scary happened to me. So I was waiting for my comp in the bathroom and while I was waiting, I was sitting next to this 12 year old chinese kid. He was way cool but I realized that I had kind of forgotten how to have just a normal conversation with people. I realized that I just kind of got into a routine the last few weeks to be really bold and blunt about the message we share and realized I don't know how to talk about much else. So I'm trying to get back to that haha... I resolved in myself I was gonna get that down. We then went to a mall later and I really tried to be more personal with people. What do you know, out of the 6 people we were able to get in contact with in the 25 minutes we had there, 6 said they would be interested in learning about the restored gospel of Jesus Christ AND I felt that we had a personal connection with all of them. Amazing. I felt so much better about myself with that. Lots of things to work on of course but like the Malays say, sikit sikit, lama lama, jadi bukit. 

Love you all!

Sorry for the short email, we just got back from a crazy hike through some caves!

Elder Hanks