Trainings and Sunday Madness

So this week was interesting. We had a lot of training during the week. We were preparing Henry for baptism. He was supposed to be baptized yesterday. He ended up not getting baptized because there was an activity after church so we had to postpone. 

Yesterday was a pretty crazy day. In the morning we had to split off, so I was with the native Lao members and Elder Ellis was with another Brother.  We went and brought people to church, then, when we got there, it was super crazy because Elder Ellis was not there yet and there was a ton of stuff going on today.

Henry needed to get interviewed for baptism, Jack needed to be interviewed to get the Priesthood, and Jack doesn't speak Thai so I needed to be there to translate that. There was a random investigator at church, and we got asked to teach the lesson for Primary in the second hour. We had a lot of stuff going on at one time.

It all worked out well.

Jack got the Priesthood and Henry will get baptized by him next Sunday. 

At church yesterday, we also had that family come back that had the old Book of Mormon.  They ended up staying way late after church, too.  They were hanging out with a bunch of members, so I guess that is good. 

We met with Jack’s wife for the first time this week and she came to church this week also, so that was awesome. She is going to come next week too, for Henry's Baptism, so that is really good.

As far as the rest of our week, we did more contacting or just walking around and inviting people and, on Friday, we had a zone missionary training. There was a lot of good stuff.  On Saturday, we had a Stake meeting, about all work in the stake, and what everyone needs to do.

Well, not much else for this week.

--Elder Cheney 

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน

 เอ็ลเดอร์ ชีนีย์

New Investigators

So to start off, this transfer I stayed in Samutprakaan with Elder Ellis. Our p-day last week was good we played arrow tag. It was good and the arrows didn't hurt, which was also good.

I am really happy to be here in Thailand. Being a missionary is the most fun I have ever had; I get to go out every day and talk to people about someone they may have not even heard of.  There are a lot of let downs in missionary work but if you work hard, the work can be satisfying even if your labors are not successful.

The anticipation for transfers this week was really insane. They didn't get transfer calls out till the day before, then it was a little anti climatic when nothing crazy was happening here.  Then our Wednesday and Thursday was empty because we didn't know if we would have to go down to transfers or not, so we hadn’t scheduled anything. 

We got some new investigators this week. It is a cool story; we were waiting for our investigator to come meet us at this shopping center and this lady came up to us and asked: ‘You guys teach about Christianity right?’ We answered yes and then she said ‘Well, Buddhism isn't working too well for my family right now and we want to change religions.’  So we meet with them at their house and they had a Book of Mormon that was the old Thai translation from like 6 years ago, and because that Book of Mormon was just randomly handed to them she knew that we teach about Jesus. It was super cool. They have read part of the Book of Mormon already. So it is a mom and two daughters that are interested. 

Then, this Sunday we had Sister Cowfan and Henry come to church. Sister Cowfan passed her baptismal interview. We had plans for her to get baptized next Sunday, but after the interview we found out she actually lives in Bangna's area so she will get baptized in their ward. Still probably next Sunday.

Well that's about it for this week     

-- Elder Cheney

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน

 เอ็ลเดอร์ ชีนีย์

Chonburi, Siracha and Crocodiles

So, I guess this week I will start with last week’s P-Day activity that I forgot to mention. We went over to the Samutprakaan crocodile farm.  It was a ton of fun.  

To list off all the stuff we got to do there I:

Dangled chunks of raw chicken into pits of crocodiles,

Touched and took a picture with a live Crocodile,

Watched a man stick his head into the mouth of a crocodile,

Watched a elephant paint a picture,

Watched Elder Dickey get chased by several tigers,

Held a Baby tiger, 

Touched a hippo,

Gave a monkey an inviting card,  

And last but not least, I ate a crocodile burger.

It was a pretty fun p-day and afterwards we still had enough time to go pick up my new suit. It looks super good.

As for our work this last Friday we went over to Chonburi. It is a province in our area. We went down and spent the day visiting members down there. We got to teach these new investigators at a member’s house. They seemed really interested but we really can't go down to Chonburi that often so we are not really sure what will happen with them. The members where super fun to visit and they are super excited for us to go down because the Elders pretty rarely go down to Chonburi. We also got to go even farther down to this place called Siracha, Some of your minds might be jumping to the type of hot sauce. This is the place where siracha sauce was created.  We were not over there that long but it was a lot of fun. The whole day was kind of hard because we didn't know where anything was so we had to ask for a lot directions. Once we just had to trust people and jump in some random van that they said would take us to where we needed to go.

On Saturday we met with Gi.  He is really interested in learning about Christianity and we are really excited for him.  He has tons of questions. Then on Sunday we had one of our investigators, Sister Cowfan, come to church. The interesting thing is that she only has Sunday off.  So since that is the only day she has off, she wants to really take advantage of it.  So our Ward starts at 1 pm and she got to church at 8 am.  So we got a call from the other Elders that our investigator was at the church. We had to hurry and change our plans, hop in a taxi and rush over to church.  She knew church was at 1 pm but she was just really excited to go.  So then we have hours of extra time, so we taught her basically everything in the missionary discussions ans she has a baptismal date for July 24th.  She is super excited.  It is awesome. 

Well, that brings us to today.  As far as today's adventures, we are going out to this archery place where you fight against another team and shoot them. They say the arrows don't hurt you, so we will see how that goes.

-- Elder Cheney

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน

 เอ็ลเดอร์ ชีนีย์

Zone Conferences, 4th of July and My Birthday

This week was really good.  To start it off we had my birthday, which was on Tuesday and it was a great day for being away from home and everything. We had district meeting and there, the Bangna Elders (Elder Parish and Elder Cecil), had remembered that it was my birthday; so they had made a cake. It was super good, then later in the day, when we were in English, I was up in front, teaching English, and I start seeing the students talking in the back, then all of a sudden Brother Won is collecting 50 baht from all the students and he leaves. Towards the end of the class he came back with stuff but went into the kitchen, then at the end of English he came out with a nice cake with candles and everything and the whole class sang Happy Birthday to me. They also had gotten me a Thailand Shirt.  It has an Elephant on it. It is pretty cool. It was a good day. 

Other than that, we had a good week. We visited a lot of Less Actives, while visiting one LA we went over to his house, and he is living with three other people that where really interested in hearing from us. So that is really exciting. We had a lot of those LA's show up to church this week. It was really awesome to see. 

As far as our investigators, we are setting up to have a flood in baptisms next transfer. We Have Brother Mote, Henry, Gii, and Cowfan. Also a lot of these people have families we are trying to work with as well, so it is looking really good right now.

We had Zone Conference on the 4th of July. it was really fun to spend the day hanging out with other missionaries and receiving trainings from President Johnson and the AP's it was also the fourth of July; that doesn't mean anything in Thailand but since I was around a bunch of people from the states it had a degree of significance.

That is also the reason that I am emailing on Wednesday this week. 

The pictures for this week are the English students on my Birthday and some nice Green slimy thing we ate at a member’s house the other day.

That is about all for this week.

-- Elder Cheney

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน

 เอ็ลเดอร์ ชีนีย์