Thanksgiving and a Baptism

Hello!

This week was great. We had Thanksgiving and a baptism.  So, for Thanksgiving -- we ate dinner as a district. Elder Sheffield and I cooked the turkey, and other people in the district brought other foods.  It was really fun.  We ate in the high council room at the Stake Center, so it even had a big long table.  I liked it.  We had turkey, potatoes, corn, rolls, jello, salad, fruit... It was a lot.  It required people to give a bit from their packages from home and also a lot of luck when we went shopping in Betio (the place with the most variety of cargo). It was great.  It was very fun. :) There are 12 of us in our district.

The baptism.  It went well.  We had a good turn out and he, Panette Naatua, was very excited.  He is a nine year old and his family is preparing to go to the temple.  We are excited for them.  They are such a delightful family.  I am glad for them.

Also, Timon and Iotebwa both came to church this past week. Whoot! I am excited for them. They are progressing very well towards baptism! They are the first investigators that I have seen a great change in their countenances. They look happier. They are changed by the Lord's words.

Work is going great.  We are working on doing better studies because a major focus of our mission tour was to become Master Gospel Teachers and to study well.  We need to take care of our own souls before we try and help others with theirs.  I like that lesson.  We need to help ourselves before others. Otherwise, we are not being responsible. It is not selfish, it is a must.  We need to help ourselves, so we can help others. Learn ourselves, so that we can teach others.  It is great. :)

Well, love you all!  Hope that all is well.  Keep the faith!

Thank you!  Love you all!
Hurrah for Israel!
Elder Weenig

Elder Sheffield and I with Panette Naatua and his family

 No one is ready, but they are all smiling, something they would not do when posing for the picture.... :) So, yeah, this is just to show you all that they are not angry people.

The Feast

Thanksgiving with my district

Smile

Howdy!

Life is going well!  It is almost Thanksgiving.  Exciting, right?  We will have Thanksgiving dinner with our district.  My favorite thing to eat here is breadfruit soup and fried breadfruit. It is yummy. :)

Well, this week we had two investigators come to church! Whoot!  Ten Iotebwa -- an older man, and ten Timon -- a man in his 40's. We are so happy.  The ward was great to fellowship them!  Members are the greatest!  They literally swarmed them. They were all like: "He's new -- go get him." "Take him to class" "Bring him over here"  It was perfect.  Yep. Teaoraereke 2nd Ward is truly the greatest and is supposed to be splitting soon.  Anyway, ten Iotebwa also went to an activity with the high priests that afternoon.  It is good.

The members in Banraeaba are fun and very missionary oriented.  They are great examples for what I want to be.

All is well over here.  Thought of the week is to smile more often. Even though it is a small thing to do, great things come from it. :) "The grass grows green still". Little things make the world better -- a lot of little things therefore make the world a lot better.  Seeing as there are lots of opportunities to smile, we can make the world a lot better if we smile more.

Love you all and pray for you all! Thanks for all you all do for me!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Thank you!
Hurrah for Israel!
Elder Weenig

Marshall Islands/Kiribati Region Missionaries -- November 2017

My intake at Mission Tour

Te moii moto --  coconut juice.  Yum. :)

Betio Cannons :)

Jelly fish...  But it looked cool...

Mission Tour

Hello!

Well, this week was amazing!  We had our Mission Tour.  It was exciting!  Elder Ardern of the Seventy came to speak to us.  He spoke at the last General Conference. He gave great lessons.  He spoke on using Preach My Gospel everyday.  He also spoke a lot on the power of the Book of Mormon to convert people.  It was amazing!  It was really fun, because we, the Zone Leaders, Sister Training Leaders and the Assistants to the President, got to do a Mission Leadership Council meeting with him. He taught us our roles, helped us form a list of attributes for our culture, and how to use our planners. It was amazing.  I loved his training.  I really loved how well he and his wife taught together.  Usually the man talks a lot and then the woman shares a tiny bit and sits back down, but these two were like missionary companions -- they switched off frequently and were a team.  It was awesome.  I want to teach more like that with my companions in the mission.  I loved the conference. :) We helped bus everyone there.  It was fun. :)

Transfer: So Elder Veresoni flew out to Washington Island in Kiritmati.  So that is cool.  He is amazing.  I have a new companion now, Elder Steven Sheffield!  He is from Lindon, Utah, and we went to the same Junior High School -- Oak Canyon.  Cool, right?  And yep, we did know each other before the mission.  He is amazing and is going to be an great companion. We just became companions today.  So, it will be exciting. :)

I am grateful to work as a missionary of the Lord.  We are focusing on acting more like messengers of the Lord would act. Life is good.  Life is great.  Life is short.  I hope we all appreciate it for what is worth.  I know that today is the day to change and repent. (Alma 34:31) Today is the day to be happy. (2 Nephi 2:25)  We can seize the day if we wake up happy (Alma 37:37 -- let your heart be full of thanks to God).  Today is the day.  Seize it.

I love you all! Thank you for everything you all do! I love and pray for you!  Hope all is well!

Thanks!
Love you!
Go, fight, win! (remembering that life is a constant fight with Satan. :) )
Hurrah for Israel!
Elder Weenig


He hasn't been able to send pictures because the computer they use has viruses and he is afraid it will delete his card.  Fun to find these pics on the mission Facebook page.

Zone Conference

Enthusiasm

Howdy!!

So, this was a great week.  We had great lessons.  So, in companionship inventory, Elder Veresoni mentioned that I could be more enthusiastic in lessons. He was right. I have literally almost fallen asleep in a couple of lessons....  Yeah... Oops... Anyway, not anymore. So, we added more enthusiasm to our lessons and it has been amazing!   I mean we are teaching the gospel of peace, the gospel of joy, the gospel of Christ, what is there to not be enthusiastic about? So, might as well teach with the voice of a trump.  Anyway, we had good lessons.

One investigator is ten Tetoa.  He is in his twenties.  His mom is a less active.  She sat in on one of our lessons and it was great.  She committed to come back to church!  Whoot!  We are excited for her to come back.

We had a lesson with ten Toabo.  He invited his family to have lessons, only a couple of the kids agreed to take lessons, but at least he shared the gospel.  That is one thing that I love: as our faith in the gospel increases, so does our desire to share it!   Yep. It is awesome!  I am glad to see him share the gospel with those around him.  Ten Timon also did the same thing with his family and his son came to church, before we even had any lessons with him!  It was amazing!  I am so happy to see the growth of people's faith, and my faith!

Life is good!   The gospel is real and true!   We are living in the dispensation of the fullness of times. What a great time to live.  We have so much to share -- the gospel. We have absolutely no reason not to!


It makes me happy to see the spreading of the Gospel of Christ and seeing the joy that it brings to people's lives. I am grateful to live in this time, this blessed latter days. There is more light than ever before.  We just need to look at it! Look to the Light!  Look to Him!

Love you all! Thank you for y'alls examples!

Love you!
Share the Light!
Hurrah for Israel!
Elder Weenig

Zone Conference

Howdy!

Hope you all are doing great!  I am doing just dandy.  We had Zone Conference this past week which is always accompanied with transfers. I am staying and so is my companion, Elder Veresoni. It is great.  I am excited for this coming transfer.  It is will be amazing, Elder Versoni is amazing! He said to me on the way home one day, "By the end of the transfer, let's have 60 people in our teaching pool" (teaching pool: how many people we teach).  I am excited!!  I love having a companion that is driven and motivated!  I hope I can be more like that -- optimistic, pleasant, and motivated.

So, Zone Conference was amazing!  We had great trainings.  Elder Murri from the East Zone gave a training on tracting and good first impressions.  It was great!  He started with the classic "Sorry I was sick this past week and so I didn't have much time to prepare, but we will see how this goes...." and you could see the attention in the room drop by a good 200 percent.  Then he clapped his hands nice and loudly -- giving several people heart attacks and pointed out that saying that is a horrible first impression.  He then restarted by doing a rap about tracting, and everyone paid attention very well in his training and we all loved it!  It was amazing!  Moral of the story:  First impressions are extremely important and even if you don't have much time to prepare, don't demean your talk or training or speech or whatever it is that you do by pointing out the fact that it may not be very well prepared or that it may not be of worth.  Because the moment we say that, people don't listen.  Yep.  Be creative and enthusiastic when giving talks or, more importantly, when sharing the gospel. It was a good lesson for missionaries and for everyone else as well.  We also had a great training from Sister Moungatonga-Fowler (from the West Zone -- the zone I am in) on opening our mouths.  We need to try to talk to everyone.  Even those people that seem hopeless and even if people reject us, our goal is to at least leave them with a good impression of the church.  We need to smile more, make people laugh more, and share the gospel more (we is an all inclusive pronoun being used here to imply all those that are members of the church, not just missionaries.).  I found their trainings to be amazing and inspiring! Zone conference is amazing!  We also had Stake Conference.  It was good.  Elder Sinjoux of the Seventy came to speak to us.

Well, my thought for today is to be happy.  Be positive.  Be optimistic.  From Gordon B. Hinckley's life, we see that he was an optimist. One thing I noticed is that he said he was an optimist. It was not only said about him, but he said it himself.  To me, this means that he CHOSE to be an optimist. Just as one chooses the choices that lead them to say "I am a doctor" or "I am a teacher", one also chooses the choices that lead them to say "I am an optimist."  I know that people are born good. People are by nature good (any one wants to argue that? Because you'll lose -- we are children of God and we chose to follow Him in our life before we were born, and are therefore good), but life is not quite so good (due to a not so pleasant fellow named Satan).  So, we are put in a position to choose whether or not we will be happy in this life.  It is all up to us.  We can look at a day and say : "Today is going to be a great day" and it likely will, so long as we continue to say that even with Satan whispering just the opposite in our mortal ears.  My point is this, we choose to be positive. We choose to be happy.  We choose to be optimistic. That is what is so great about agency. It is all up to us.  I know that we can choose.  I know that we can always choose to be happy because the Lord Christ died and rose for us.  He loves us and supports us and blesses us and is our greatest, truest friend.  I know He lives! He is real!  He is true!  He is fact!  He has a Gospel for us -- the Gospel of Peace, the Gospel of Joy, and a Gospel of Happiness.  I know this and hope to hold true to it.  I hope we all continually remember to choose to be happy (choose the right - choose to be happy.).

I love you all!  Hope you are all well!  Keep on being amazing!  I look up to you all and you all make me happy. Thank you so much!  I love you!

Choose the Right!
Hurrah for Israel!
Elder Weenig

Zone Conference

Happy Fiji Day

Mauri!

Happy Fiji Day!  October 10th is Fiji Day.  It is like Independence Day, but for Fiji, cool, right?  My companion, Elder Veresoni is from Fiji.  It was a good day. We made a fancy dinner at home - courtesy of the "Just add boiling water" mashed potatoes that came from America (thank you family!).  It was fun. :)  Anyway, I hope you all had a fantastic Fiji day.

This week was great!  I am grateful for it.  A couple rough days where we did not get very much done and motivation was not at its peak... But it was great, because the past couple of days have been amazing -- great lessons, new people, all that good stuff.  This week is a proof that even though the sun doesn't shine super bright every moment of every day, it will always come back out.  I like that lesson -- yep, the knowledge that even though life can seem hard, the sun will come out tomorrow. :)  (the song from Annie begins to play in the background.)  Love you all! :)

I love being a missionary.  I love knowing that the Christ is my Lord and my Savior. I hope and pray not to lose sight of the knowledge of Christ and His Atonement and His Gospel.  Satan attempts continually to chip away at that knowledge and faith. I hope to keep it strong through increased faith in Christ -- prayer and study and fasting, a brighter hope, and truer charity.  Please don't lose sight of that bright and glorious light, which is Christ, our friend, our brother, our all.

Love you all!

Keep the Faith!

Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Weenig

One year mark party with my MTC intake (We had burgers and fries... Expensive, but yummy. :) )

Happy Fiji Day Meal (It was also Elder Schoeny's and Elder Rowsell's one year mark in Kiribati)

Haircut -- done by the one, the only, Elder Veresoni.  He is amazing!

General Conference

Mauri!

And yep, I recognize that the title of my email is probably the exact same as 70,000 other missionaries.... :) But creativity requires effort.  If anyone wants a cool name for it, use Maungatabu -- that is the Kiribati word for General Conference.

Well, love you all!  This week was remarkable.  I will get down to explaining why it was such a great week: GENERAL CONFERENCE!!!

Aren't we so lucky that we get to hear the words of the Lord through His prophets each six months?!  I hope that we are more like the pioneers who accepted the words of the Lord to the fullest of their understanding. I hope that we don't act as other peoples in the past (Nephites, Lamanites, or Jews) that had the prophets among them, but did not hear their words.  I know that General Conference is real.  Their words are real. Their talks are real.  Their testimonies are real.  Their promises are real!  They are real, because they are not theirs, they are His.  I am coming to understand what it means when people say that the Lord will speak to us through the mouths of His holy prophets -- it means that He will.  If we come with a sincere heart, and a desire to be learned of God, we will be able to receive more light from on high.  I am grateful for the light that was poured out and illuminated the area around me so that I could see the answers to my questions.  I know that the Lord will answer our questions if we ask in faith.  I have asked Him questions before, but now I am learning to ask of Him with faith NOTHING wavering.  In the Infinite Atonement book by Tad R. Callister (the nice fellow, who gave a remarkable proof and testimony for the validity and absolute truthfulness of the Book of Mormon in the Sunday afternoon session of conference), it says that for us to understand the Atonement of Christ we must become like Joseph Smith -- master askers!  I believe that for us to receive answers to our personal questions, we need to learn to ask questions and act on what we are told. I want to work on this. Ask and he shall receive.

I have had a great week!  We are working to get new investigators. We are teaching a man named Iotebwa. He is great!  He is an old man. He even came to General Conference. We didn't see him, because he went to the other building which is way far away...(he didn't know where our church building was.... which is understandable, but also a bit funny seeing as there is only one road on the island, so just so long as you go in the direction of the building you are looking for, you cannot miss it....) But anyway, the moral of the story is that we are very glad that he came to General Conference, we have only been lessoning with him for a little over a week.

Love you all!  I want to write more, but my time is up! Keep on being amazing!  The church is true.  It is real.  I know these things are real!  In the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen

Hurrah for Israel!

Elder Weenig