Spencer - Called to Serve: Week 74 - The Force is Strong with this One! And Random Acts of Kindness.

It has been another wonderful week down here in the Spice Islands! This past week was busy and this upcoming week will be even busier! I am super excited for everything!

This past week, we had our MLC meeting and brought in the leaders of the mission and had a great days discussion with them and set some pretty high goals for the upcoming year! On Saturday, we passed our baptisms from last year and now have 147 when last year we were 142 and we still have time in this year! Next year, we are looking to increase that even more! This mission has never seen anything like this before! We are being lead by great leaders, President and Sister Donald! The leaders came in on Monday for P-day so we had some extra time to go to a few places. We went to one of the malls that is close to the house and found a countdown until the new Star Wars and also found lego R2D2 and a lego C3po! It was legit, however my countdown is a little longer.

On Wednesday, we were stuck in the office with lots to catch up on and ended up traveling to the outskirts of Jakarta to have a split in Tangerang! We had a great 2 days there! On the first day there, it started raining cats and dogs out of no where! These little kids that were following us quickly got us to a spot where we could stay dry. We had a great time with them as they played out in the rain. We had been sitting in this little guard post thing when someone across the street called us into their house! It was an act of kindness. As we started talking with them, we found out that they actually own one of the biggest mosques in the area. It was pretty crazy to see pictures of it. The rain had finally slowed after about an hour and before we left, they gave each of us a yellow towel to take with us to wipe our faces. That is how we got the yellow towels! Friday night we came back and had English class. Saturday we were finally able to get out and work in our area. We had a couple lessons that went well and met lots of people on the bus that would be interested in learning.

Sunday was just an awesome day!! We had 2 investigators come to church both now with baptismal dates, probably around 5 less actives come which was just amazing to see and the Sisters had a baptism!! It was a great Sunday!

This upcoming week we have the mission your with one Elder Wong and his wife as well as the Pongs. We start here in Jakarta on Wednesday, travel to Solo later that night, Thursday in Solo, travel to Surabaya, and then on Friday we will be in Surabaya. We will do splits in Surabaya for a few days and then return here just in time for a good group of missionaries to head home before Christmas! We will be super busy but everything will be awesome!

I know the church is true and the work continues on!

Elder Hayes