Happy Maori Language Week! - 9/24/2023

kia ora whānau

I've developed such a strong love for the Book of Mormon in these last several weeks and have found so much comfort and peace within the pages. My testimony and belief in it has grown more in the 42 days of my mission than in the last 18 years of my life, and that is one of the greatest blessings I've been able to see since I've been here. Only made it to 2 Nephi chapter 7 since I've been in the field and I've already found so many life-changing verses that I had never seen before! My favorite from this week was pretty short and sweet but I just hit me so hard...

1 Nephi 20:10 "For, behold, I have refined thee, I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction."

Yous can do with that what you will, but I jumped out of my seat and started running around the flat when I read that. And since it was Māori Language last week, here it is in Te Reo Māori...

1 Nīwhai 20:10 "Nā, nana, nāku koe i whakapakari, nāku koe i whiriwhiri i roto i te ahi o te whakamamaetanga."

Anyway, pretty good week to be a missionary in Taupō, New Zealand. The weather is starting to warm up, lots of new people found, lots of dinners with church members, and lots of spiritual experiences. 

On Thursday we drove down to Tūrangi to meet with some people and when we stopped at the bakery for lunch this guy walks in, pays for our food, and walks out without saying a word. When we asked for his name he just winked at us, and apparently he did the exact same thing a few weeks ago for some other Elders. We had never seen him at church and he wasn't there this Sunday so our guess is that he's a non-member that just likes paying for Missionaries lamb and gravy pies. People here are so nice!! And in the same town, on the same day, a bunch of teens with face tats pulled up next to us in this old muscle car and started handing us food. Kinda scary at first, but hey I'll always take free food.

Before we headed back to Taupō we stopped at the branch president's house to introduce ourselves to him and his family, and suprise, suprise, they were the nicest people ever. Sister Bailey made us spiders, which is just ice cream and some kind of soda and it was truly life changing.

On our drive back up we stopped to see this gentlemen who had referred himself to us and asked us to bring him a Book of Mormon, which almost never happens. When we brought him one and we met him, he told us that his sister was a member of the church and that his brother was the bishop of the Hastings ward. Not sure why he doesn't go to our church but it's awesome that he was requesting a Book of Mormon! We were able to explain what the book was about and shared our personal testimonies of it which was a really cool experience for me. We left him with an invitation to come to church and to read the introduction so we'll see how that leads.

Sunday was a really cool day! We drove the 45 minutes down to Tūrangi for church and only 5 of the 16 members of the branch showed up but it was cool to get to know those 5 members! It was funny though cause we were just casually talking before the meeting starts and then the branch president stand up at the pulpit and starts speaking in Māori, and my Māori is very limited so I didn't get a lot of it. It was really cool singing the hymns in that language though! Then when the branch president was just talking about something in a language where I understood probably every 20 words, and all the sudden I hear "Elder Atkinson" at the end of a sentence and then he went and sat down. So my companion, who understood the word "korero", said bro he just asked you to give a talk. So I just kinda walked up and just started talking, and I didn't know what to talk about, or how long to talk, or what language to speak in so I just started talking about the reason I served a mission and shared some scriptures. I went for 8 minutes and I had never talked for that long without any planning so I was quite proud of myself.