Time flies...6 months as a missionary

Hey all!

Wow, has the time flown by or what! So on the 10th of August will be my 6 month mark as a missionary. It has just been crazy how the time flies when you get busy and throw your life into the Lord's work. This last week has been another great week here in สะพานสูง. The work has slowed down a little bit, so we have lots of time to go find people who are interested in learning the gospel.

So Monday to start: Nothing amazing, just another P-Day and a chance to sit and rest for a little bit. We have time at the end of the day to go inviting or teach lessons. We had neither. By that I mean, we had no lessons and no new potential investigators.

Tuesday: Well, another not so successful day. Only 1 new potential for the day. The Zone Leaders came and did a District Development Meeting with us. It was an excellent lesson on faith and using the Book of Mormon in every lesson. Since that is why we are here, to testify of the Book of Mormon and the restored Gospel. Then at the end of the day, we had a good English class. I taught a class of 10 people by myself for the first time. That was fun :)

Wednesday: So, it started out as a pretty good day. Studies were good that morning. We head to the church to teach our first lesson for the day with เพิ่ม, and then we notice something strange. The church had three broken windows. During the night, the church was broken into. We figure the first broken window was to get in. They get in and notice that the Sacrament room is locked and also find the clerk's office. They go back outside and break both those two windows to get into the rooms. Nothing missing from the Sacrament room, but the computer was stolen form the clerks office. That is not so good, since that computer contained all the records for the member's of the branch. So for the past week, there has been at least one security guard on duty 24 hours. We did still teach the lesson with เพิ่ม. Other than that the day was a little exciting. We go to eat lunch and just as we start to eat, we get a call from a potential we had called earlier, saying that he was at the church ready to learn with us. So we shove the food down as fast as possible and get to the church and teach him. It was a very excellent lesson. We taught another lesson that day and then still only found one new potential unfortunately.

Thursday: Another slow day here. We long planned for the next week. We were only able to teach one lesson with an investigator and then we taught ประกาสิทธิ์ (our most recent baptism), so that was just a recent convert lesson. We didn't find any potentials.

Friday: Now this was a very fun day. We had only 2 appointments for the day, lunch and dinner. We spent the whole day inviting. We taught one lesson off of an invite and found 9 potentials through out the day. I can't decide whether it went really fast or really slow. We break the time up into 1 hour sections and that really helps. We had some cool experiences, one where at about 400pm, a lot of clouds were coming over us where we were inviting. We start heading back to the bikes because it looks like it is just going to pour. Then the wind just blows it over and no rain. So we keep walking towards the bikes and then past them. After that we got 3 really good potentials :) It was a way cool experience.

Saturday: We had our weekly correlation meeting with members of the ward and the branch mission leader. It was way good and we got a lot accomplished. So it was almost the same as with Friday. Inviting all day! So we head out and around 300pm it is just about to rain. We park our bikes and get under some shelter. Just right when we get under a roof (it was a big indoor market thing), it begins to rain. And when it rains here, it rains, hard. It just wasn't cats and dogs. It was elephants! So we get stuck for an hour while it rains. We run to a store next door and get a little wet, buy an umbrella (which we really didn't need), grab a taxi and make it to our only appointment for the day. Then we walk back to our bikes (took about 30 minutes and by this time the rain is done). We head to the next place we want to invite and it is flooded beyond all reason. It was about 5+ inches of water throughout the whole neighborhood. At that point we turn around and go and invite in the neighborhood around the house. No potentials for the day.

Sunday: Woohoo! Baptism number 2! Our investigator เพิ่ม was baptized. We now do not have any investigators. At all. So we spend a lot of time finding. Well Sacrament meeting was fun. It is Mothers Day here on the 12th, so the primary kids sang for the moms and it reminded me of home. It was fun. We were able to teach 2 lessons after church and then went inviting until the end of the day. We got 5 new potentials and one of them we are seeing tonight (Monday 8th).

All in all a cool week. I really got to practice my Thai and had some good time walking down streets. Thailand is awesome and I love being here as a representative of the Lord.

Sincerely,

Elder Ackerman
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