Week 57: Game over man, game over!

 大家好！


We got our transfer news on Saturday night and I will be staying in English work!! Which I'm very excited about. Elder Smith is going home tomorrow morning, which is a tragedy because he's the best Elder in the misison. So I was a little nervous to see who my new comp would be, but fortunately it's Elder Shields who I'm super good friends with! He will be a brand new ZL, so I'll be helping him learn how to do all that good stuff. Also we lost 14 Elders this transfer who went home, and we got none back. So they closed down the second Elder companionship in our area so now it's just us. And also the Zone leadership is now completely different except for me. Gulp. This is gonna be a wild transfer haha. 

Highlights
- We did a Zone challenge this week of inviting 194 people to church as a Zone every day and trying to get 66 people to church on Sunday. (our mission baptismal goal is 194 and our zone baptismal goal is 66) We did really well the first few days and then kind of lost momentum later. But on Sunday out of all the friends at church, half of them were there for the first time!! Which was sweet. We got two friends passed off and one of them is so cool, totally gonna get baptized!!
- In Hong Kong they have a program called Summer Missionary which is where youth 16+ and young adults can come do missionary work with us for a week to get a feel for how it is. Ours is doing Wednesdays and Saturdays the whole summer, which is awesome! His name is Jake Jacobo, he's from the Philipines. He's so cool though, it's been awesome! He has a really strong testimony and has been learning how to be a missionary super fast. He's only 16 too, which is really impressive!
- We had the Food Angel service again on Friday and we met this super cool guy named Justin who is athiest, but was really down to talk about religion and what we believe. He wasn't interested in coming to church, but said to hit him up to go hiking on our pday sometime
- The mission is going through a lot of changes since so many missionaries are leaving, which is really interesting to see. I'm excited to see how the atmosphere and mission culture will change going forward, and also a little nervous cause I'm starting to be one of the older missionaries in the mission haha. Crazy

Spiritual Thought
This week we taught our friend Trevor again, who is a Protestant and very knowledgeable about the Bible, so he asks a lot of really deep questions that are sometimes hard to answer right off the bat. We taught him when Jake was with us, and after the lesson we asked Jake what he thought. He mentioned that he felt really nervous about the fact that he didn't know how to answer Trevor's quesitons. So Elder Smith and I shared with him about how to find answers to questions, about how it's okay not to know everything, and to look for answers in the right places. And also how important it is to remember what we do know. As Elder Holland said, "In this Church, what we know will always trump what we do not know." We have so much knowledge in this church, so many answers to quesitons. I'm so thankful for modern revelation and scripture that answer so many of our questions and guide us through life!

Love you all!
Elder Blankenbiller


Google Photos

Pictures
1. Food Angel
2. I look like Bernard in Megamind
3. At the Tyagis new house!! It's bigger!!
4. Dinner at the Tyagis
5. RIP my Cantonese language tutor, my GOAT Elder Ko, 高長老







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