Week 78: Another week in ประเทศไทย

Hello family and friends! I hope you all had a great week! These weeks are just flying by! I can't believe I only have about 6 months left on my mission. When I get to bed at night, it's seriously the greatest feeling ever. And when I wake up it's the complete opposite. I feel like sleeping at night is usually just a way to recharge for the next day!

Last Tuesday, we had interviews with President Johnson and it was way good. We took a bus and a boat and then from there walked to the mission office in order to interview. President Johnson is such a good guy and he truly cares about the missionaries here in Thailand. He's really tall; maybe 6'7". Anyway he always hugs me after our interview and I'm just so little compared to him but I think I'm used to it now haha. We also had district meeting last Tuesday and also some lessons and English class. We were so busy!

I did a switch-off with an elder named Elder Whitaker this past week. Elder Whitaker and his companion live in a different house but they still work in the same ward as us. They're in our district and everything. Anyway, I stayed at their house for a night and worked with some of they're people as well. It was nice to get a little bit of a change. One of the guys we met with was a man named Sangchai and he actually spoke Chinese as well as Thai. He spoke so much Chinese to me and I pretended to understand what he was saying for the most part but he was pretty nice. He wouldn't agree to come to church on Sunday so hopefully he will in the future. We taught another man named Brother Thong. He was kind and nice, but not the most humble. However, he wants to know if God is real. I tried to get him to read and pray everyday, but he wouldn't agree to it. Kind of frustrating. 

Sister Gif, Saguy, and Brother Butter are still progressing. Yay! Hopefully the three of them will be getting baptized this upcoming Sunday. If so, we'll have four investigators getting baptized that day since Sister Buy passed her baptismal interview on Friday.

The Lord has been blessing the work in this area but that doesn't mean everything in Thailand is all rainbows and butterflies. This mission has been the hardest thing I've ever done! The heat, the language, the exhaustion, the rejection, the disappointments- I still have to deal with these things. And when I focus on those things, life gets pretty dang hard. But Jesus Christ lives and loves us. This gospel and the message and joy it brings is so important. I know God lives. He loves us. We need to share this message with those who don't know it. 

Elder Rawlinson

Last P-day, we went to an area with sites of ancient Buddhists temples. It was pretty cool! The area is called Ayuthaya.