I'll start with a rare shout out. This is to my brother Elder Riley Chappell. He is going home this week! I have always looked up to him and even now in my missionary service sometimes I daydream about being companions with him and just baptizing nations like Alma and Amulek or the Sons of Mosiah. I miss you and love you Riley! Congrats on a successful mission, I am sure you helped so many people.
Anyway, back to the interesting stuff. This week has been pretty darn good. We had Mission Leadership conference on Tuesday, where we drive 3 hours down to Melbourne and have a meeting with President and Sister Vidmar plus the APs and all the ZLs and STLs. That is always really good. President Vidmar is such a great teacher. I love the way he uses stories. He always uses stories from the Olympics to make points. He has thousands of Olympic stories because he not only competed in them, but he has spent his life in them as a judge, a journalist, a coach, committee member, head of USA Olympic Gymnastic teams and so forth. He has never missed an Olympics since he was old enough to go. Until now. He has to sacrifice just like all of us do, so he won't be watching the Olympics or reading about them at all. That's so hard! I was feeling bad that I couldn't watch them but I'm pretty sure it's harder for him.
Anyway, then we drove back up to Shepp, and President followed us, because we had Zone Conference on Wednesday. Because our zone is so far apart, we had everyone come into Shepp, then stay the night, and then had Zone Meeting on Thursday to avoid unnecessary travel. So the first half of the week was all meetings. As good as those meeting were, I can't handle that much! I was getting really restless at the end. I am happy to now be done sitting and just working!
After all the meetings we had an awesome half week. On Friday we were walking down the street and I decided to sit next to a bloke at the bus stop. I could see that he was Sudanese, and from my experience, all the Sudanese in Australia are Christian, so I was excited to talk to him. His name was David and he seemed sort of interested. Anyway, I got his address and set an appointment for the next day. On the next day we went to see him and he let us straight in. We sat down and had a lesson on the Restoration with him and his brother Zach. They are 24 and 19. These guys are golden! They are really active in their church, but that's good cause that means they have faith in Jesus Christ! They understood the Restoration really well and asked heaps of questions. They will read and pray about the Book of Mormon and when they know it's true, they will be baptized on September 11.
Another family we are working with is an Indian couple. Their names are Jinny and Shilpa. They are also Christian! Honestly they are the first people that I've met that are from India and Christian! The rest of them are either Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or Atheist. So that's awesome. Kind of the same deal with them. Shilpa has been really searching already. After our first visit she read a few chapters in the BOM then read heaps from mormon.org. They are solid.
Jana came to church again, their wedding is coming closer! Then she can just get baptized. All good.
I love yous all, cheer on America in the Olympics, cause we always win.
Elder Calvin Chappell
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