A Baptism

Hello! I can't believe Jordan's graduating. It feels like a long time ago, but I also feel like my class are the most recent graduates and that's not the case anymore, crazy. In terms of the Academy, you can't begin to reapply until July 1st, but once you start, you only have a certain amount of time to complete the application, so I'd make sure you have everything and have time to do it prior to starting. My offical release date is August 9th, though I may need to come back home a little before then for transition week, and if I want to spend more than a day with y'all before I leave. 😂 Yes, if I move to a more rural part of Malaysia, especially East Malaysia, I'll have to buy a bike. There are definitely poorer areas, but the roads are always packed even though tons of people use public transport. I'm not really sure how much most people have, all the Americans have cars, but cars are really only convenient for longer trips. The baptism was awesome! Elder Zaleski performed the baptism in Tamil, twice. Lavineyaa's legs came flying out of the water the first time, and the second time, but the second time she was fully immersed before they came up. Afterwards, I confirmed her. The only family was her grandma and her cousin, so in the circle it was just us missionaries and the branch presidency. Also, an 8 year old got baptized and confirmed by the branch president at the same service, so one convert, one child of record baptism. The branch is pretty awesome, but not much Mandarin, and if they do speak it, they prefer English. Also, in terms of other areas with more Chinese, there's not a lot. They actually disbanded the Mandarin ward in Singapore, and split them up among the English wards because they all spoke English anyway. So now, I think there's only one Mandarin group left and it's a branch in East Malaysia, Sibu, I beleive. The guy from Washington is still in Singapore, but should be back next week, so hopefully we can meet up. This week we actually had a ton of people commit to come to church and none of them did, it was super sad, but we had a couple of random people show up again, so that was awesome. No nonmembers at the baptism though, so that was sad. Angelina and Kesava have both stalled. Angelina doesn't really connect the dots on a lot of things, and she also works too much. She's never been able to come to church because of work, and she tried to ask if she could come in late on Sundays and she thought they'd let her, but they told her she couldn't, so not totally sure how to move foward with her. Kesava I've never met in person, he used to text us a lot and read scriptures and he comprehended everything super well, but recently he hasn't been responding. We even straight up asked if he was still interested in meeting with us, and he left it on read, so we may have to drop him, sadly. Miracle: We made our plan for the day and felt that we should go find that evening in Gombak, which is the furthest station north on the LRT. Some things came up, and our schedule changed a bit, so we didn't get to go to Gombak as early as we had hoped. So, we needed to be home in 45 minutes and it would take about that long to go to Gombak and back, so we wouldn't really have any time to do finding while we were there. So, we prayed to know what we should do with our remaining time, and the Spirit prompted me to go to Gombak even though we knew we'd get there and have to leave immediately, so we did. When we arrived, we looked at our watch and were like, yep, we've gotta head back, so upon arriving we lined up for the next train heading back. There were a couple other people waiting for the train and as we talked to them, we found one of them had wondered about what happened after death, his name was Chee Wei. He lives pretty far, but has a lot of downtime between school and work right now, so while we didn't have tons of time to teach then, we were able to have a video-call lesson later that week and he is super willing to learn and pray about the things we are teaching, it's amazing! God is good:) Challenge: We had so many people flake on us at church when they committed right before. Also, money, food, and health have had some slight issues. Good News: Lavineyaa got baptized!!!

Love,

Elder Wardle

I ate balut!