14 November 2016

empty wallet

Our friend Siew Leong went proselyting with us

 Beautiful view(US)

 English Advertising like a boss

 Elder Hanks met his cousin

Brother L. our recent convert! He is an amazing missionary. Our Amulek! 

Hello

I am back in Singapore this week. We have Zone Conference and also MLC (Mission Leadership Council) We flew in this morning and here I am back in my old area emailing you again. It's weird to think about what I was like back last time I was here. I love Singapore. It would be awesome if I could get to serve here again. 

Anyway, I LOVE where I am servingi. This past week was a great week. When I first got to this area, it was being started from nothing because the Elders that had been here before had been pulled out because of a shortage of missionaries before. Now, there are enough so here we are to build it back up again. Starting from zero and trying to build it up has been an incredible experience of evaluation, trial, error, and success. Like I kind of wrote about last week, it's really a huge trial of faith. Finding new people has been hard. Especially in the last week, we have been trying to work with members more and get to know them and involve them more. I love the members here. So yeah like I said, finding new people to teach has been a trial. We have faced a ton of rejections and fallen through appointments in the past week and I tried as hard as I could to keep a positive attitude and be hopeful. We feel like we have been trying. We have set ourselves up for more success starting from the bottom and getting our area book and branch list organized, after that, working, evaluating, and talking openly and honestly about what is going well and what is not. We got ourselves out there with a prayer of faith that we would find the elect that have been prepared and all week seemed kind of bleak. Then, Sunday afternoon, we had our pre-scheduled appointments work out and we have 6 new investigators who are awesome. They have really been prepared. After the trial of our faith, we were blessed. These new people are awesome. We are meeting with them again next week.

Anyway, my companion and I are great, we are really open and honest with each other which helps a ton and we have been able to do our best to refine ourselves to be more effective. It's just SO cool.

We have an investigator who I talked about last week. She is AWESOME! She worked on Sunday and she was afraid of her boss to ask Sunday off, so we fasted with her and prayed and she told us a great story about how she walked up to her boss and felt no fear as she asked for sunday off. She got a few hours off and was able to come to church! It made me so happy! She is so great. 

I learned a bit about faith this week. James Talmage gives a great definition of faith in his book "Articles of Faith". He compares faith and belief. In the deep definitions of belief, it is more referred to as a passive knowledge, or something you merely assent to a knowledge or some kind of intellect but that is the extent of it. Faith is different in that it is like the next step up of belief. Faith is, like we have heard so many times, action, or acting upon belief. It is taking confidence and trust upon that belief as to bring about action. 

So I have had to ask myself sometimes. Do I believe, or do I have faith? If we feel reluctant to submit to the commandments of God, perhaps we only believe which is not enough. The Gospel is available to us so we can act to change ourselves. You can't expect that something as imperfect as man can become any better by just standing still.
Anyway, there's my little rant. The gospel works for those who work. By FAITH we are saved after ALL we can do. 

Love you,

Elder Hanks