Much of our chat this week was about the APs trip up to the Northern Territory the previous week.
The APs flew up to Alice Springs on Wednesday and had trade-offs with the missionaries in the afternoon. President Johansson and Elder Nattress (First Counselor in the Area Presidency) flew up to Alice Springs on Thursday and took some personal time to head out to Uluru and Segway around the rock before returning to Alice Springs. This gave them a long amount of time to do some one-on-one counseling/training together as well as getting to see a famous tourist sight.
On Friday they had a meeting with the Alice Springs missionaries as well as a Fireside in the evening for members and investigators. They had four investigators come along to the Fireside in the evening.
On Saturday they flew up to Darwin. Elder East sent us the following message:
But truthfully I had this really great experience on Saturday.
We had just flown into Darwin and we had gotten the Elders to the chapel to meet Elder Nattress. We went to get lunch for everyone to bring back and then had a meeting with him.
During the meeting I was about to fall asleep. I just felt so dead and I remember thinking that straight after this meeting when I go with the Elders I'm gonna go nap.
But I was also like I gotta help these Elders and be an example and so I said a prayer and was like "hey if you need me to do something up here can you please give me the strength to do it, but if not can I please get some rest."
At the end of the meeting President turns to us APs and says he's gonna need us for a bunch of things and almost Immediately I felt wide awake and full of energy and felt like that the rest of the day.
So it was pretty simple but for me, it was a really clear cause and effect of God helping me in that moment that I loved.
After helping out President, they went out tracting in the heavy rain with the Darwin missionaries and got a return appointment. On the Saturday evening, there was meant to be a Leadership Dinner with President Johansson and Elder Nattress, and the local priesthood leaders. Unfortunately, of the local leaders, three had covid, two were away and of the others, only one was able to make it.
On Sunday there was a combined Church meeting for both the Darwin and Palmerston Branches. The APs were acting as greeters. They were getting worried when with several minutes before Church was due to start both President Johnasson and Elder Nattress hadn't arrived yet, and as noted most of the other local leaders were away, in isolation or otherwise indisposed. Fortunately, they arrived right at the 9am start time.
There was a lunch put on after Church finished and Elder East was able to catch up with a number of members from Palmerston Branch who he knew. The Stubbs, who have recently moved from Canberra to Darwin also happened to recognise him. They sent the following photo to the Canberra Stake Facebook group.
On Sunday afternoon they went out to visit some of the former investigators from when Elder East was in the area. The only person who they managed to catch up with though was Sister King - again, another former Canberra member who had recently moved up to Darwin. The Kings hadn't been to Church in a while so Elder East was happy to get a return appointment with them for the Palmerston missionaries.
They then tracted a complex of six houses. From those six houses, there was no answer from two, they taught a lesson at one and got three return appointments from the others. They were happy to be successful with the tracting as the NT missionaries had been saying that they don't see any success tracting, however, Elders East & Evans taught or got return appointments every time they went out tracting in the NT during the week.
They ended up flying back down to Adelaide on the P Day Monday, so our video chat was in the evening.
Some other quick notes from our chat:
- Elder East managed to get some sand for his "collection" from one of the Darwin beaches.
- He bought himself a souvenir tie in Darwin.
- We sent him some PDFed university course guides to read on the plane on the flight back to help him make a decision about whether he needs to apply for university before he finishes his mission in June. We confirmed that his return date was the 15th June - about 5 days earlier than we'd previously thought.
- Elder East said that It has been really good being with Elder Nattress - he's a very nice, and spiritual, man. The whole trip has been really tiring though - even President Johansson is super tired.
- He commented about how being an Assistant to the President has been hard, but he's never felt unfulfilled. He feels that he's doing really well, both spiritually and emotionally.
- Here's a photo of a baby thorny devil that they found during their time in Alice Springs.
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