Rescue

I don't know about you,
but I'm feeling twenty-two,

Everything will be alright if
you keep me next to you
(and by that I mean the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost)

You don't know about me
but I bet you want to (because I'm a white girl in Malaysia on a bike and I'm pretty strange looking but you're compelled to talk to me)
Everything will be alright if we just keep biking, and preaching, and sweating and praying
like we're twenty-two oo oo

You know you miss this dork. I had the best birthday week. THIS was the best week of my mission. It was hard, and Sunday night I collapsed in exhaustion at the end of it, but I gave everything I had. I threw my whole soul and heart into helping the people, and we saw so many miracles because of it. It felt good to give an accounting of my week to the Lord and to feel like He was pleased with what I did. I tried my best to make every hour, every second, meaningful.

But first, let's start with my birthday. I got so many SMS's and calls from my friends throughout the mission. They're so good to me. I hope they'll have me as their friend forever, I totally get why people love their mission friends. The kids here understand exactly how hard the work is at this point in time. We had Zone Meeting, and Elder Hays and Elder Allen, two of the most articulate 19 year old boys I've ever met, gave an awesome training. (I'll send my picture of my notes from it if I have time). The week before, they asked everyone in Kuching Zone to prayerfully make a goal for baptisms in our area by the end of the quarter (September 30). Sister Callor and I thought and prayerfully decided on 3 baptisms, based on who we had already met. Because we're re-opening Stampin branch for sisters (it was closed for 6 weeks) we don't have a lot of people to work with. And the elders in our branch are kind of starting from scratch too. I love it.

At zone meeting, the elders gave the agenda, and then they talked about our baptismal goal for the whole zone. They flipped their whiteboard over and there was a big 27 on the back, made out of envelopes. They had us each take our envelope and open it. Ours had a 3 inside, and under it, they wrote "Don't be surprised when you get 5." I love that they believe in us. They asked us to get to know our Savior better, and do everything we could to become more like Him this transfer so we can help others. #rememberthename (Elder Hays really likes inspirational hashtags). They also asked us to pray for belief. "Help thou mine unbelief."

That night, Elder Scott and Elder Stowell took us to Sungai Laru for an FHE with a couple Iban families. We shared our testimonies and ate good, good food, and then President Mains called me so he and Sister Mains could sing "Happy Birthday" to me! I put them on speaker phone so they could sing with the Ibans, it was so cute. Tire saya kena flat on the way home, but it was all good because Sister Callor and I had a good heart-to-heart as we walked up all those hills.

On Friday, we biked to Batu Kawa so Sister Callor could menjelaskan about some of the people in that branch to the new Batu Kawa elders (who are taking over her previous area) and I never want to hear anyone say Batu Kawa is far because it's not that far from Kuching, haha. By some miracle and thanks to my handy dandy map I got us there. We had a couple hours free we weren't anticipating, and so we decided to go knocking. I've never knocked doors for the sake of knocking without a church member before, but none of our potentials were showing...potential so we decided to take matters into our own hands and find us some new investigators. We had no success and I was pretty bummed because I hate rejection.

I was already making excuses in my mind to Heavenly Father, saying, "I did everything I could." But then I remembered to pray for belief, and apologized for lacking faith. Then our luck turned around and we were able to meet with the neighbors of a couple church members in Tabuan Dayak, who are now investigators, and after that, we had just half an hour to knock some more doors. We went to a secret kampung Elder Scott told us about, and on the first door, this nice man and his roommates let us in. Super devout Anglican, loves his family back in kampung, works in Kuching because there are better jobs here, a little apprehensive at first but warmed up to us. In other words, a kingdom builder.

Saturday night, we were short of 3 investigator lessons to reach our goals, and at the start of the week, we didn't even have 3 investigators to work with. We frantically flipped though all of our old teaching records to find anyone we could meet and see if they were ready to progress. Sunday evening, we met with a former investigator of Elder Paker (remember him from the MTC?) and I got to call him (he's a zone leader in Bintulu right now) to figure out where this family lived. "Bike over the sketchy sewer and on the house to the right, there should be tons of broken glass." He's doing well.

We also met with one of the elders' investigators because they weren't able to, and Sunday night, we were short just one lesson. I thought of a potential investigator Elder Scott introduced to us a week ago, so we went to her house. We knocked on the door, and a sweet Bidayu woman and her kids answered the door. Turns out we knocked on the wrong door, haha, but we were able to exchange contact info with this girl and she invited us back. The lady we were looking for wasn't home though. "Well, we could go home and call it a week, or we could pray and rack our brains and think about any other investigators we might know."

I thought back to the beginning of the week, where Heavenly Father PROMISED us we could hit our goals for the week. And we promised Him we'd do it.

We prayed and we both thought of the same part member family. We swung by to see if they were home, and they let us in. The dad, who sat in the corner last time we listened, and had dropped the previous missionaries, warmed up to us and we had a good lesson. We laughed along with him and his daughters and he said we could come back.

As I biked home, exhausted, my heart swelled with gratitude. We had three or four days this week where we didn't have any lessons at all because we were being shown our area/showing Batu Kawa their area/meeting church members and we had set ambitious goals for an area that was previously closed. For a sec there, I didn't believe we could do it, but I will show you a God of Miracles. And I know we can bring three precious souls to the waters of baptism by the end of September. We promised, and He promised.

On that note, we got a text from the zone leaders this morning saying our zone not only met our goals this week, we exceeded them. #YoungGoHards2014

Oh and my favorite song right now is "Rescue" by Yuna, a cute litte Malay girl who is gonna be big in America one of these days. "She's got life in her veins, she don't need no rescuing she's okay."

Can't you see that she's walking on air?

-Sister Wynn