10-24-11

Magandang hapon po or mayong apon for you cebuano speakers out there

   I’m doing pretty good, this week has been pretty good. The area is starting to pick up a little bit, and this week we decided to split it down the middle with the APs. We've been working that side already so it works really good. We found some new investigators and it’s been good.

This week has been great. Elder Holland and Elder Callister have been here in the Philippines all week. Elder Callister and Elder Nielson of the Area presidency did a mission fireside for us on Wednesday and it was pretty legit. Them and their wives spoke and it was all good. Elder Nielson talked about changing the culture around here, that Catholic culture of going to church on Christmas, Easter and your birthday. He compared it to Samoa, where the whole country shuts down on Sundays and the belief of the Sabbath day is very strong. He said 75,000 people have been baptized in the past 10 years here in the Philippines but only 10,000 are active and so that’s our big problem that we have to change. Elder Callister shared about Christ's church (all from the New Testament and made Elder Stover look silly when he raised his hand and shared a Book of Mormon reference, whoops haha) and also about being a consecrated missionary, way good stuff. He talked about how if we only change our behavior on our mission, we'll go back home and be the exact same person. We have to change our nature to be the person we want to be. So that's what I’m working on. Time flies by and I don’t want to be the same person when I get home so I’m going to keep working on that nature. It’s kind of a hard thing to get it "rooted out of my breast".

On Friday Elder Holland gave a fireside for missionary age YSA that haven’t served. We asked president if we could go but he told us to go to work, which I was fine with, no biggie. Well not until I found that that President let the AP's go and not to tell us. Ya I was kind of mad about that but forgive and forget, right? On Saturday Elder Holland and all of them had priesthood leadership training with all the leaders from 3 missions and president said we could come and listen to his talk. We got there late because of temple tour but we did get to meet Elder Holland and he put his hands on our shoulders and asked how we were doing saving the less actives. We said doing our bes,t then he touched my head and said he liked my haircut. Not bad..not bad.

haha but ya temple tour was good. We took our new investigator, Marian and her friend Rose. They live with our other investigator, Lucille and her husband Rio who's a member. Lucille couldn’t make it but we had fun with the other two. They show this awesome video about Christ in the end and some good tears are shed. Marian is astig though, we gave her a Book of Mormon the first time we taught her and she read the 1st chapter and half of the second one and took notes. I was impressed, cool stuff. We got some other new investigators as well. Brother Joel is someone we just talked to and the second time we came to teach, on Sunday, he was looking for us and so excited to see us. It was cool and he believes in Joseph Smith as a prophet. Cool guy with some interesting experiences about Christ.

Oh man and we talked to this one guy as well. I don’t mean to down anyone beliefs but man his were pretty different, like how he's a healer guy (forgot the exact title) that does it the way Christ did and how he does water healing, blind healing and like 3 other healings. It sounded like Avatar to me but hey, he liked to talk about muslims too. We set up an appointment with him for tonight so we'll see how it goes.

Anyways, It’s been a pretty good week. Elder Quinton is doing pretty good. I’m trying to help him teach a little more, he's pretty shy about Tagalog. I’m trying to get him to just practice but he’s a bit hesitant, good guy though, once he gets more confidence in himself, a bit more faith in the gift of tongues, and he'll be fine.

Love you all, hope everything is going great. Thanks for the pictures Mom from conference, appreciate them. Pray for you all, and I’m grateful for all you do.

love

Elder Stover