October 2/3, 2011

Elder Rowe and Elder Kim - "Best Day so far in the mission"

My dear whanau,

Hello! How are you?! It's great to hear from you and all the exciting news that's been happening. Except the fact that you were sick... But glad that you're better.

Conference weekend! Isn't it the best? I haven't even watched it yet, but I'm way excited. That's awesome about the temples! Especially the Provo one. When will it be done? Because maybe I can get married there. Just kidding! I don't have any such thoughts. This weekend we'll be able to watch Conference at the chapel. So we're totally excited. And yes, we hope to invite everyone we can to hear a Prophet of the Lord speak to the world. So that will be great.

I've been exercising a lot since being here in Palmy. Elder Stratford and I play basketball with the other Elders in the mornings and it's much more effective then my attempts at jump roping that I did in Levin. Also, today, and almost every P-day, before emails, the four of us go to a "gym" with one of the members of the ward and do boxing training. As a work out of course, not as self-defense training. But it's definitely the most exercise I've done my whole mission, or even in the past few years. So hopefully it will turn all this excess baggage into the muscle I once had.

From Monday to Thursday morning this week I was back in Levin with Elder Kim, my replacement. He's Korean, from Hamilton, and he is "crack-up" (which means he's hilarious). We had an amazing exchange! I loved being back in Levin and seeing some familiar faces such as Levi, Hemi, and the Huavi's. The best thing about the exchange was Wednesday. Elder Kim and I both agreed that it was the very best day of our whole mission so far! And he and I came out at the same time, so it was a great celebration of our year mark for us. What made it such a wonderful day was the fact that we were so busy. It seemed like we never stopped. In fact, in the evening we had to run to our appointments. We taught two lessons on our same street, and then ran to the car to get to the final appointment at 8:30 (half an hour late). It's hard to describe how wonderful it all was, but overall what made it so great was all that we were able to accomplish. Our lunch and dinner breaks were only about 20 minutes each, because we just didn't have the time. So, yeah, it was awesome. And I sent those pictures as just a taste of how happy we were.

This Saturday, will be Keoni's baptism! So he's totally excited and all will be working out great! I'll let you know how that goes next week!

Something else really cool that I found out recently, was that there are now Kiwis on Mormon.org! Have you been on the website? We use it quite often actually to help people with an interest in the Church to have more of an interest in the Church. The best thing about it is the videos. If you go under the OUR PEOPLE headline at the top, and then to "I'm a Mormon", there are a bunch of videos of members of the church and their stories. But the best thing about it is that recently they put up videos of Kiwi's. And I know one of them. His name is Paora, and he was in my ward in Christchurch. He plays for the national basketball team, the Tall Blacks (a poor spin off of the All Blacks' name) but I hope you can find that video, because I've totally been in their house. So check it out!

gotta go!

Bye

I love you