Tyler In Tahiti

Hello my friends!  Yet another letter from Tahiti; the land where the Young Women think every missionary is smoking hot (just by sheer nature of his being white, and a servant of the Lord maybe), the Young Men think we're the flyest dudes alive, and all the kids think we're actual superheroes. The adults too. Like, for reals. This week was better than last. Finally got to see Kevin, and he's doing much better. He unfortunately moved his date, but it was only to like a week later, and he actually attended this other baptismal service we invited him to (and that I had to speak at) so that was highly reassuring. We've finally got some new investigators, and I think we've got some potential. This one chick, Vaianui, is really commited, just from the first lesson, and I'm really excited to see what becomes of it. A really hard experience though was when we met with one of our investigators. We came over and it was a bad time, so we peaced out. Then when we ...

This week we got to go to the temple. I totally did the session in French like a pro. Not a whole ton new this week besides that, though. Still just been working hard every day and, honestly, struggling a bit. This week's been kind of hard. Our bishop hasn't showed up to any of the splits we've asked him to come on with us, we lost an investigator, we've been having real trouble with our current primary investigators in terms of commitments, we haven't seen Kevin in a while and his mom swore at us when we came trying to find him, and we didn't even meet our goal for lessons taught this week. It's been a little discouraging. But, what are you gonna do? We just keep going, and keep working, and trying our best. We've been fasting and praying quite a lot, and I've been trying really hard to be more exactly obedient to the rules (#gettingupatexactly6:30) in the hopes that it will show the Lord how much we need the blessings. I feel ...

Another week has gone by... We ate dinner with this lady who plays the piano in church, and she just loves to correct the missionaries French. She spent like 5 minutes at minimum explaining and re-explaining this one simple phrase to me and basically saying the same words over and over again. Nailed it. There have been not one but TWO spiders the size of my Size 10 foot in our house. The first was almost under my man-purse (not cool), and the second was there when I opened the door to take a shower. Ugh. I got a phone call right then from another missionary, so I went to take it, and when I got back, the other Elders had seen fit to light the spider on fire, as opposed to just spraying it with Zig-Zag. They combined our district and another district into two, and my companion is the district leader! So now we get to do baptismal interviews. We got there early though for our first one, so we played volleyball in the street and shared the gospel with these random kids. It ...

Hi Everyone! Not a whole ton of new stuff this week besides us fixing our first baptism! We fasted for a miracle, and that's what we got, man. His name is Kevin Brej, and he has already received his witness and has come to sacrament meeting and loves everything about the church. He is like the golden investigator, man. He's already to page 27 of the Book of Mormon and we spent Sunday's gospel principles class explaining the Tree of Life vision. He'll be baptized on November 26 (a little ways in the future, but that date has significance for him). It's truly the work of the Lord that we're doing here, and despite my missing everybody so much, I really am thankful to be out here becoming a better person and being a part of this miraculous work. I think that's all for this week, now here are the pictures! -our barbecue as a zone. it rained when we were prepping the food...                           ...