Exchanges, Buses and Birthday Parties

This week has had some interesting stuff. 

I guess I will start off with our current investigators. Dan is doing good and is super prepared. The only thing holding him back is he has had a bunch of mandatory school activities the last two Sundays so he hasn't been able to come to church. He is really doing well though. He passed his interview already but we are probably moving his baptism back a few weeks due to the fact that he hasn't been to church that many times.

As for our other investigators; the family that had the really old Book of Mormon that we were teaching, we are no longer teaching them.  The mom is not really wanting to turn away from Buddhism and her daughters are kind of following her as well. It is a little sad but I think we are just playing a part in preparing them for later. 

All of our other investigators have been pretty quiet. They can only meet on Saturdays and we couldn't meet with any of them this Saturday. They are either not answering their phones or are in another part of Thailand for the weekend. 

For some fun stories from this week, We were eating dinner at this one place and as we were there Elder Ellis observed that they sold stickers across the street and he has passion for stickers so we went over and checked it out. I was looking through this rack of T-shirts labeled at 40 baht (1 dollar) It is a pretty good deal for new T-shrits so I was looking through and see one shirt that says Jewell Blue jays (Jewell is a insanely small town in Oregon close to where I live. My Grandpa taught at the High School there for 20 years). I was pretty surprised at this considering that I was in Thailand. The shirt even had an Oregon National Guard logo on the back. I ended up getting the shirt because I thought it was so funny to find it there and 40 baht isn't that much.

This week I had an exchange with Elder Parish. it was super fun. He is actually my District Leader right now so that was a really fun day. I also felt super good at speaking Thai because last time I taught with him I had only been in Thailand a few months. It made me feel super good.

Brother Won had his birthday this week. Brother Won is always hanging around with us and helping us teach. He doesn't have a job and he is preparing to go on a mission so it is a good use of time for him. So we celebrated that a decent amount. We had a family Home Evening Monday night and Elder Ellis had made this Blueberry Cheesecake for him. So we go to light some candles for the cheesecake and realized we didn't have a lighter. So after scrambling around a little bit we lit a piece of paper on fire in our toaster and used it to light a candle. Then the next day for lunch we ate ice cream with him and some other people.

Then this is the really weird one. So on Saturday we got onto this bus and as I was standing there I see a white person on the back of the bus which was pretty weird because Samutprakaan doesn't really have white people (besides me) I looked over there again and he waved me over so I awkwardly move through all these people and go talk to him. He ends up being some Irish man that has lived in Thailand for 12 years. He was kind of odd, but I talked to him for a while then Elder Ellis notices some member on the bus that is really less active and has been dodging our phone calls for the last few transfers. The member tried to play it off like he doesn't know who the Elders are, but then Elder Ellis talked to him while I was talking to this guy It ended up with the LA member taking a picture of us with the guy and his kids. After we got off the bus we were so confused at what happened. The LA posted the picture on facebook and a member grabbed it so the picture is attached.  

Well that is what I have for you all this week.

-- Elder Cheney

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน

 เอ็ลเดอร์ ชีนีย์

Splits and Unfixable lights

This has been a good week. Last Monday we played laser tag. It was really fun. We played using this special deal where you bring in 5 bottle caps of this one specific drink and then they let you play laser tag for free. It was really fun and today we are going to play again but this time we are going to play multiple rounds. 

This week went pretty good. We are still running into a lot of problems with our investigators only having Saturday free. We spend a lot of time during the week visiting members. We had a cool story in the middle of the week. We met with a less active member a few weeks ago and it turns out they work on Sunday and just can't really come to church. We left her with a commitment to introduce the gospel to her friends. So we left and then this week we called and set up another appointment. Then when she came to the place we set to meet at, she had a friend with her so we taught her friend and she was pretty good. Then as we were walking out of this shopping center she went and introduced her to two of her other friends. 

We also ate dinner at the Elders Quorum President’s house this week. It was really fun. We went there and he taught us how to make this Japanese curry. It was super fancy and tastes super good. 

We had a Zone training on Friday. That was pretty fun. They talked a lot about contacting people with love and really caring for that person. It was a good training because when you are just contacting in crowds of people it is easy to have your contact lose meaning.  

This Saturday we had to do a lot of stuff again. We had a lot of investigators to meet with, so we split off into two companionships. So Elder Ellis and I both went out with a different member and taught. it was a very good day. We also got to meet with the Bishop in the morning. it was fun. We walked in and he asked me, “Do you know how to do electric?” I replied with a ‘sort of’ and then he takes us over to his kitchen where he is trying to replace this light. It turns out there is more to the problem than originally thought so that didn't get fixed despite all my efforts to help. We ended up working on that for about an hour and a half before we got to actually start talking about the Ward. 

Our Investigator, Dan, is doing great. He is super prepared for the gospel and is progressing well towards his baptismal date (Sept 4). 

On Saturday I also had a good lesson with Brother Mote. He seemed like he was really excited to go to church yesterday, but he didn't come. It was a little sad because he said he was going to bring his family and everything. So that was a little bit of a let down yesterday.

Well, that is a good summary of our week. I hope I have some more interesting stuff next week. 

--  Elder Cheney

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน

 เอ็ลเดอร์ ชีนีย์

English day, epic Saturday and Confirmation!

This week was pretty good.  On Thursday we got approval to do a service project at a school.  It was an ‘English’ day.  It was super fun, we just taught English to these kids all day. It was kind of funny because they just asked us to speak English all day to try and to help the students as much as possible. So nobody there knew we spoke Thai and it was always fun to listen in to the student’s conversations. It was super awesome there and they had all the students write about how they felt at the different stations and they were all happy at ours and not at the others, so that was fun. (It is probably because they gave us the easiest station).  They also had the best warning sign for the towel dispenser at the school.

This Saturday was also really fun. We are kind of sitting at an awkward spot where all of our investigators only have Saturday off so we don't have that much set up for our weekdays but then we have all of our investigators on Saturday. This Saturday we got to meet with this new investigator. He is super solid, and he is a self referral from online which is super good. For all the missionaries who are familiar with this, they almost never happen. To get new investigators you almost always have to find them yourself. He is serious about learning, too. We taught him on Saturday and he came too church with us on Sunday. He is really quiet but serious about learning and everything so right now he has a baptismal date for the first Sunday in September.

Also, yesterday we got a confirmation!!!!! (As in the baptism we had last week got confirmed. And the confirmation is as important as the baptism.)

It was a pretty good week. Today we are going to be playing laser tag again.

-- Elder Cheney

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน

 เอ็ลเดอร์ ชีนีย์

Baptism!!!

This week has been a good week. Last Monday we went over to this naval base that had a bunch of stuff. We went because they have a bunch of monkeys over there. It ended up being blazing hot all day so all the monkeys were not out, so that was a little depressing; I bought snacks to feed them and everything. We got to go around and explore this old boat.  That was fun. 

We didn't have that much excitement during the week.  Our week is kind of hard because all of our investigators are only free on weekends and a lot of them were doing stuff this weekend. So we went to a lot of Less Actives and we did a lot of contacting as well. 

This Sunday we had a baptism!  It was super awesome. It was for Henry; Jack’s son.  It was super cool to get Jack reactivated and given the priesthood so he could baptize his son. When meeting with Henry and Jack this week we also got to meet with Jacks wife. She has not been around every time we have been there, but this week we were setting up Henry's baptismal program and he wanted his mom to say the closing prayer so she came down and we were able to teach her for a while and teach her how to pray.  She did an awesome job at the baptism and a lot of members at church are really excited to see a family coming in. So we are really excited to start working with Ohm (Jack’s wife). 

That basically brings us back to this week this week. We are planning to go over to the archery fighting place that we went to about a month ago.  It should be a lot of fun. 

-- Elder Cheney

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน

 เอ็ลเดอร์ ชีนีย์