Miner Mission-Major Blessings: "Do you have the time?" "Yeah, it's 11:30..." "Ok thanks!" (Gets up and walks away)

So that was probably one of the more creative rejections I've ever experienced. We were out at the beach trying to contact, and that's how the first one went. Yup. I just kind of laughed though, what else can you do?

Hello all you beautiful people back home! I've heard Utah has been pretty hot recently. I feel bad, because it's pretty much perfectly beautiful here. Jealous yet?

So, first week in Magenta is down, and it's been pretty awesome. In terms of office duties, we took two departing sister missionaries to the airport on Friday. They're probably home in Tahiti by now, and they were a great addition to our mission.

Now, in terms of proselyting, do I have some stories to tell... In our mission, the goal is for every companionship to teach 20 lessons per week. Because of our office duties, this has been a real challenge and last Friday night, we were only at 6 lessons for the week, so Elder Kessler and I decided to do things a little different. We set our goal for the day at 4 lessons for Saturday, the last day of that week and then planned out our day. Elder Kessler felt that we should try tracting at an apartment building near ours. While tracting, we found and talked to an old investigator from Ducos who both of us knew and we had a good conversation, but that's not the cool part. As we were talking, we watched his neighboor go into his apartment, and thought nothing of it, other than, "Oh, now if we knock on his door it'll be weird," but after doing the rest of the doors, Elder Kessler felt impressed to talk to him anyway, since his door was open, and we had an amazing discussion about what happens after death. We've since had another appointment which went fairly well. His name is Sebastian, and I think he has good potential to progress well. From there, the rest of our day was nothing short of miraculous. We went to one of our main areas for proselyting, the Tours de Magenta and had a lesson, and then as we started contacting we walked by a group of young people and said hi, and one of them stopped us and asked "are you the preachers?" (That's a literal translation, it makes more sense in French.) Apparently she had been looking for us for a while and we had an amazing discussion about the Restoration and she just drank it all in, she just wanted to know what church is true, just like Joseph Smith, and after we finished we asked if she had any questions, and she asked if we had any good prophet stories, so we told her the story of Enoch. We have another appointment on Saturday, we'll see how it goes. We had another couple of lessons through tracting and contacting, and by the end of the day, we had passed our goal of four. This is truly all thanks to the hand of the Lord acting to put people in our path as we did our best and exercised faith in Him. It was honestly probably one of the best days of my mission.

I hope everyone back home is having a wonderful summer. I know that I am absoutely loving it here in New Caledonia, and though I miss home, I really have begun to fall in love with this beautifully diverse country and people.

See you all real soon,

Elder Miner