Hurricane and Earthquake!

Malo lele! Good to see you guys. This week was a great week. It flew by for some reason. I'm not mad tho. It was kind of a crazy week here in NZ.


Mother earth decided she wanted to try and wipe out new zealand this week. But she did not prevail. We had hurricane Gabrielle hitting us all week, so it was pouring rain Monday through Friday. Then, on Wednesday a 6.8 magnitude earthquake hit. Somehow, we are alright. The earthquake hit right of the coast of Levin so it did the most damage by us and Paraparaumu. There were roads that were flooded and closed off. But, other than that the work continued. I've got a crazy story about the earthquake. There's this lady that had us give her haunted house a blessing. So, that was a week ago and now this week we went back to visit her. Me and Elder Moli taught her and went to see how she was doing. Then at the end of the lesson elder Moli went to pray. He opens the prayer up with "Dear God" and right after he said that the earth started to shake. We were confused. It stopped shaking for a sec and then a huge quake hit and we all started stumbling and grabbed on to the lady's wall to keep stable. We learned from that experience that God speaks to us in unique ways.

The mission work was a little slow this week tho. Not much happened. We had a good week but nothing really interesting happened. We have been teaching our friend Gila. Gila(pronounced nida) is from Tuvalu which is a small island by Samoa. He is super cool and loves having us come over. We've had some good lessons with home and we hope to get him to church this next week. We also had a member bring his nephew to church on Sunday. We showed up and he said i need you guys to answer this kids questions that he got from YouTube. Which usually isn't a good source of information. But, I was excited because I felt I could help. We get into the lesson and he begins to talk about king follett sermon and other deep doctrine things. Which I was super hyped to hear because I felt that i could finally use the many hours of listening to Travis Anderson. That went good and were going to teach him again next Sunday so that's exciting. Other than that there wasn't much to this week.

I got to go a marae this week which was super awesome. It was such a cool experience. They fed us hangi. Which is like a luau if you are wondering. The food was delicious and they were doing dances and singing in the background while I ate so that was an experience. I'll try to attach a vid.

Spiritual thought: I just want to talk about something i read in PMG this week. I had to give a training on member fellowship with new members. So I read about we can best help new members. It was cool to read and realize just how hard it is for new members in the church. I don't think those of us that have grown up in it realize just how hard it might be. It is an entire change of culture for a lot of people. But we don't realize it. Our job is to help the new members and recent converts of the church to feel as comfortable as possible and to befriend them. Because I know a lot of them feel alone and feel as if they don't fit in. Here is a quote from PMG talking about new members and their experiences being new members "if you do not know what it is like, try to imagine what it is like". I invite you all to try to imagine what it might be like converting to this church, because it can be hard and incredibly lonely. So if you know a new member, I want you to reach out to them and be there for them to keep them in this gospel. Because this gospel brings blessings and we should want all our members especially our new members to continue to live this gospel.

Alright that's all! I love you all and hope you have a good week!

Ofa atu elder Larson


                                                                                            sick new shirt


                                                                                            wendys in NZ


                                                                                exchanges with elder Moli


                                                                            marae hangi celebration vid


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