Bula Bula Bula

How is it?

This week has been a very eventful one and we have a had a lot of fun in the process. So first off last Monday we went as a zone to a park and played ultimate frisbee until four and while we were driving home we got a call from our Bishop in the English ward (great guy) and he asked us if we could take a trip with him down to Stanford to the hospital to take one of the less active ladies to the ER.  But seeing as Stanford is out of our mission we had to quickly give a call to our Mission President who then gave us the OK to go. So we went down and spent a couple hours down there helping her out.  It was a way weird situation because she was plastered drunk and was just threatening suicide and what not, but it was pretty sweet though to see her react to the spirit even in  her state that she was in. While we driving down there she was just freaking out and so we decided to do the only thing that we thought would help....scriptures. We read with her from the book of Alma and it worked wonderfully, it calmed all of us down and she was able to stop talking and just listen to the book.

I'm not gonna lie, when I left on my mission all I could say about the Book of Mormon is that I liked it. Nothing else. I mostly left on my mission so that I could spend my time helping others. At first I think I  pictured in my mind more community service than anything, I'm not sure why I even had the desire to go because my testimony wasn't strong, and I was unsure about a lot of things that the church taught. It’s not that I didn’t think they were true, I just had never acted on them. I guess what it really was is that I saw friends preparing, leaving and returning from missions, I saw the changes in their lives that they were making and had made. And then at the APTC camp I realized without a doubt that I was going nowhere at that point and that I wanted to end up like the guys I saw who had already made this decision.

So then I entered the MTC wanting to change who I was and interested in finding out how to do so. The first few weeks into the MTC I had given much time to reading the Book of Mormon, through doing this I realized what I had been missing and what these other guys had. It was simple, it was "the spirit".  They had understanding, they had direction, and they had guidance. They knew what they wanted and they understood how to get it.  I soon came to figure that same thing out, I started realizing what I wanted. Now the thing that stuck out to me was the role the Book of Mormon played in all of this, it taught me the things which I should do, it taught the doctrine of Christ which is the doctrine of our lives. It explained to me very simply what I must do in order to succeed and to be happy in this life and how this can carry into the eternities.

Goals: I don't think my goals in this life are different than any other guy my age who is of our faith or who is not.  I want to do good in school, I want to help others, I want to have a good job so that I can provide for my family, I want my children to grow up being better than I am. And I also know that a person doesn't have to be a member to achieve this because I see it all the time without the church. But there are some goals that I have because of my faith that can help me now that others may not have, Eternal Perspective. I know without a doubt that I will live again after this life; I know that everyone will, that part of the plan is not up to us. I know also that it is by our choices in this life, today, that will determine our happiness after this life. All of this understanding I have comes from the Book of Mormon, what it teaches, as well as other things that we learn from the church.

What I'm ultimately getting at is that the Book of Mormon is true and that it gives us understanding and help right now, because it testifies of Christ and his divinity. It teaches us that through him we can all be reunited with our families and with Him and our Heavenly Father again so long as we give in to their will and do what they have asked of us. I am not perfect. I have made mistakes, am making mistakes, and will continue to make mistakes. But I will learn from my mistakes, I will try and not make them again, but most importantly I know that as I try to have righteous actions God will help me. I understand this and I want others to understand this, I know that the lady we helped last Monday, Heavenly Father loves her just as much as me. He wants her to have Happiness just as much as anyone; He has given us the Book of Mormon for help. Everyone needs to read it and if they do so with real intent, having a desire to know what is right, they will receive their answer, and they will know what I know.

Peace and blessings,

Elder Hanke

This letter speaks for itself...  I don't feel like I should even interfere with the message that it carries. I am so humbled by what my own son can teach me every week.

Love to you all.

Fijian happiness, California style...

What’s goin’ on? Ha-

Bula Vinaka!

Au sa tiko mai na lotu Vaviti sa set sara ga mai eke .

            

This week has been like a breath of fresh air, a glass of ice cold FIJI water, the smell of fresh laundry…

The branch here is small but it definitely has the Fijian spirit, I love it. We went around a lot this week to meet some of the members and pretty much every single one of them know people that I know whether it’s family or friends, so I have had a lot of fun with that, ha. We also cover half of an English ward out here and they are also great, lots of sweet members.   But honestly, we have been and will continue to focus our attention on the Fijian branch. They have a lot of less active members that we want to bring back into the fold, and also there are a lot of potential investigators that we can look up and start teaching, so I’m pumped. Unfortunately, Pita’s parents don't go to this branch. There is another one in the Santa Rosa mission at a place called Navato or something, but they do know I’m here and they'll be coming over here soon so I can see them.

But ya, the week has just been great. Every time we run into a new Fijian person I start talking to them in Fijian and they like freak out and ask me if I’m Fijian and I just tell them that I am and so we all get a big laugh.  It’s classic, I could do that all day. We have some sweet investigators and I’m pumped to do some teaching to them. I’ve already had some really cool experiences since getting here which is great.  My area is crazy, meaning our whole mission plus some is my area.  In the white ward we have boundaries, but for the Fijians we have been approved to go wherever they are and if that means leaving the mission then we can do it so that is crazy. We mostly work around South San Fran, San Bruno and San Mateo, but we went all the way to downtown San Fran twice this week for appointments.  So… it will be pretty interesting to see how these 9 months will be but I’m excited.

What else, that’s the most of it.  I have only dipped my feet into the water at this point so next week I'll have more of the deets to give you. This week all 4 of our investigators were either gone or busy so I haven't actually been able to sit down and get to know them.

Happy Father’s Day to Dad and the Grandpa’s , hope you all had a great day!

That’s all folks.

Peace and blessings,

Elder Hanke/Tavoi

Temporal side note, haha: I now have 5 minutes from where I live a huge shopping mall with a Kohls and whatever else I need, so thank you so much again for the package but I should have been more patient.

Also, will you send my church sulus over as well as some of those colorful house sulus please?

Speaking of a breath of fresh air.... wow, what a relief and a blessing to hear Elder Hanke sound so happy!  He really seems to be getting back in to his "Fijian Element", which I am so very grateful for. 

"Peace and blessings" to you all, thank you for your continued support of Elder Hanke.

Someone in Oakland is rejoicing...

My family and friends, I love ya'll,

How are you doing?

Over here is fantastic! I don't have a lot to share this week because I only have one big thing on my mind:

Transfers......

(I'll be going to the) Fijian Branch for the last 9 months of the mish! No more of this English stuff, haha. I'll leave to go out there tomorrow and I'm so pumped, I can't believe it, haha. Another crazy thing is that my new comp is Elder Porter Simmons, the same Porter Simmons that I went to high school with and graduated with and the whole nine yards. Ha, I'm excited  and I can't wait to leave and hit the good ol' Fijian trail.

But that's about it, that's all that's on my mind right now and I don't feel like talkin about anything else!

So peace and blessings,

Elder Hanke

Wow, what great news!  I am so thankful that Garrett received this transfer so he can join up wtih the Fijian ranks in California.  Obviously he is VERY happy.  :) After eight weeks in Oakland, weeks of working and hoping and waiting.... he will again be able to teach and work with the Fijians.  I'm sure he is ready to absorb himself in the culture that he's grown to know and love, although I'm sure it will be different that Fiji, which I'm sure we will hear all about.

Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the beginnings of summer.

Thanks to everyone for your love and support of Elder Hanke.

Bula Vinaka

Sounds like everything is going great for you all. Over here it is pretty solid.

As for the temporal stuff, quick, the pants I just need ASAP, haha, like last week, ha.  The camera thing and music stuff isn't a rushed thing.

Now, as for the week.  Greg....we had to drop him.  He was a really good guy and what not but he wouldn't make any commitments to come closer to Christ, he is just comfortable where he is at. I know he believes in the Book of Mormon but, like we know faith without works is dead, you can only have so much faith without acting upon it. We aren't here to force people to change, just to invite them to change, and the rest is up to them. So we'll tell the next missionaries to go back there in like six months to check on him.

This week as well as the 5 other weeks I have been in this area have been challenging.  We’re kind of lost.  We talk with everyone we can teach, anyone who will listen, but still we are having a hard time finding people who will really investigate the church. But we have seen some serious blessings come from at least being in the right place at the right time doing the right thing. Meaning there were a couple times in the week where we wouldn't have plans for an hour or so, so instead of chillin’ and waiting for our next appointment we got up and just went out and tried to find someone and it worked pretty good, but we'll do anything at this point to get some new people in the teaching pool.

A cool guy we met this week was this guy from New York, he was sweet.  We got out of the car and he just came up to us and was all like, “Hey, are you the Mormons? Do you have some literature for me?”.  We talked to him for a bit and we didn't hardly do anything, he was just like “OK sweet, so what time does your church start on Sunday? I’m gonna come”, and we were just blown away, haha. Didn't really know what to say, then I was just like "oh heck yes" and gave him the directions and what not so it was sweet. The Lord gives us blessings sometimes that are just so obvious and so huge, it’s so awesome.

One thing that I wanted to share with you from Zone Conference is Mormon.org. We had a training on it and what it is, I’m sure you have heard about it but the church is just putting a big push on it with missionary work. It’s way cool though, I encourage you to go and get on it, watch some of the videos and make a profile to fulfill your member missionary work.

That’s all I have time for.

Peace and blessings,

Elder Hanke

Here’s a link to the website that Garrett referred to.  There are some great videos to watch and some really good information.  www.mormon.org

Love to you all, hope you’re having a good week. 

Bula Bula Bula

What’s up with the fam and the friends? 

Things here are pretty alright. Oakland is such a different place, it blows my mind.  Each day we run into so many different people from so many different places, I can hardly keep up with it. It’s pretty cool though. Right now our only investigator with a baptismal date is a man named Greg. He is from Panama and is hard to understand sometimes. He has a pretty bad cigar problem but we’re helping him overcome it. He is tight though, he always comes to church and intros himself to everyone.

And we have another lady we’re teaching who is from Vietnam who is just this crazy old lady but I love her. She talks through probably 94% of the lessons we give her, so it’s super hard for us just to teach one point or anything at all because she just talks and talks and talks, hahahah. But she is doing good, she has super strong faith and it will be cool to see her grow.

There are a few others we are working with as well but nobody very close to baptism, we’re sure workin' on it though. Downtown Oakland is a sweet place, there is always something going on. I swear there’s never, NEVER a dull moment around here. There is a lake pretty much right downtown and we went there this week to find some referrals and street contact and it was pretty much the biggest waste of any three hours on my mission, hahaha. We couldn’t catch anyone from the referrals and the only person who gave us a moment of their time was this lady sittin' on the bench, but she was from the Jehovah’s Witness, so she was only interested in talking.  She wasn’t about to talk about the gospel though ha, what can ya do though, right?

Other than that things here are pretty good, all we need in our work is more people to teach, but hopefully that will come.  I gave a talk in church yesterday and really stressed the members giving us referrals, so hopefully they got the message.

Peace and blessings,

Elder Hanke

PS I can’t send pictures until you send me that wall adapter for my camera.

Happy Birthday Grandpa Mike!

Not much to report this week from Elder Hanke.  We did get to have a sweet phone call with him on Mother’s Day, which was awesome.  He sounded great… he's getting adjusted and back to his “old self”, while realizing and accepting that his mission life now is almost completely different than it was in Fiji.  This will definitely make him appreciate things in a different way than before (we can sense that already, after five short weeks in Oakland).

I did get an amazing letter for Mother’s Day also.  He wrote lots of memories from growing up, which pulled on my heartstrings, and may have possibly caused me to shed a few tears.  That is a letter that I will treasure forever!

Garrett’s “modus operandi” when it comes to email seems to be…”You send me a good email, you get one back” (with his parents at least).  J  Fortunately, Steve got an email off to Garrett in time today, because I didn’t.   Here’s the response he got back…

Dang, haha, sounds like a lot going on back there.

We have a lot going on here as well. Zone conference is tomorrow for the missionaries.  My mission president goes home sometime next month so everyone is kind of all acting weird about getting a new one, but I have no worries. Ha, the new one will be my fourth mission president!  Haha, crazy.  

We don’t teach nearly as much here as we did in Fiji.  Over there I would average like 20 something lessons a week, and here we’re blessed to get 10, but that’s alright, nothing I can do about it.

Peace and blessings,

Your son

I did chat back and forth with him a little bit, and his final response said:

Sorry, no time for a good email.  All is well, thank you for the letter you sent, it was good, and the talk thing was sweet.  Tell that guy thank you.

So… that’s all for now, folks. Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the warmer weather!

Take care and have a good week.

This week has been pretty crazy, we have been into some pretty crazy situations this week that I didn't even know could exist.  At first when I got to Fiji I thought that breast feeding was bad, ha, but no….

It was a challenging week for sure.  We worked pretty dang hard but didn't get any results from it.  I swear we had a bunch of lessons planned and a bunch of stuff to do but I bet 80% of it fell through.  We weren't even close to our goals this week either. But all is good, there is nothing we can do about that. 

Mostly right now I miss being senior companion.  Now that I’m in my own area I’m reminded of how rough it is to just follow around your companion and not being able to give any input, really just follow around. One thing I do know is that tracting is probably the most ineffective way to work that I can think of.  Spencer Lee mentioned this to me when we talked, and now I can affirm it, ha. It’s so much easier to street contact because at the door you’re just hoping that someone will answer, but on the streets there are people already there and you don't have to wonder if they will answer. But ya, I just had to get that off my chest, ha.

My area is just downtown Oakland.  If you looked on Google earth at all the big buildings that’s where I spend my days right now.  I’m just hoping that after a few transfers here that I get transferred to the Fiji Branch for the rest of my mission, which is what seems might happen. (Funny fact though, a kid that I graduated with is here in this mission and he is in the Fiji branch right now, Porter Simmons.)

  

I’m stoked though because I do have a good story for you today.  Prayers do get answered most of the time in ways we don't realize or expect but this time is was very obvious.  All day yesterday was the worst, we didn't get any of our investigators to church then afterwards we had no lessons planned or anything so we just went through the day doing all we could to share our message, and it just wasn't gonna happen. So throughout the day we just kept praying and saying that we would keep working as hard as we could but we really just wanted one lesson, at least one more would be appreciated. But we went all the way until 8:30 with nothing and we decided to check one last house. He was there, ha, but he was smoking a big ol' stogie, but that’s alright though (don’t judge him because he sins different than us). We got him to set it down for our lesson, and we focused on baptism and receiving the Holy Ghost, then I went in and shared a scripture about how God could help him overcome but only if he wanted to and he said yes. Then we knelt down and prayed for help, and it went way good so we got a return appointment tonight to see how it went.

That’s it, that’s my piece.

Peace and blessings,

Elder Hanke

Well, this is just the mama’s humble opinion, but he sounds much better, like he’s getting back in his “missionary groove” – which is great.  And I have to say “Thanks” to Spencer Lee, who took the time to take Garrett to lunch before he left and have a good chat about serving in this mission.

And… right now I don’t even want to know what he’s referring to with the “breast feeding”comment! Enough said… right?

Hope everyone has a nice week. Thanks so much for all of your love and support! J