Sister and Elder Hintze: 5/8/23

 

Monday, May 8, 2023

Hello everyone, and happy spring! The temperatures are now in the 80’s here and we are

beginning to feel the humidity. We’re holding onto our seats for the real summer to hit!

As mentioned last week, transfers happened and we had to say goodbye to Elder Cosme. We

heard he was transferred to Atlanta. Elder Chapman’s new companion here in Thomaston is

Elder Buffham. He is a soft-spoken unassuming, incredibly bright young Elder. Within the first

few days he was here he contributed wonderful ideas! We are blessed to have him work with us.

One of the first projects that we will be doing with him and Elder Chapman is to host a booth at

the upcoming Emancipation Days celebration. This is a big occasion here in Thomaston. We are

going to have a video on the award that was presented to President Nelson from Morehouse

College showing on a t.v. and we will be presenting The Proclamation on the Family,

We had some wonderful teaching opportunities this week with two awesome families that we are

working with. We got to teach Wyett and Kelli the restoration of the gospel. Although they are

both members of the church, Kelli’s family wasn’t active when she was growing up so she

doesn’t have a firm foundation of gospel knowledge. Wyett has simply put aside everything he

taught as a missionary ten years ago to seek out information on religion by researching on the

internet. All it’s done is confuse him. So, we started from the beginning as they asked us to do.

We hope they are following through on the invitation we gave them to read from the Book of

Mormon for just a few minutes each day. This week we are going to have the opportunity to

meet Wyett’s sister who is coming to Thomaston to visit them before she leaves on her mission

to Australia. What a great family!

We also had the opportunity to teach Cody again. He is a wonderful guy! He goes to a nondenominational Christian church, but he admits that his life would be easier if he shared his

wife’s faith. He wants to believe, but there are a few things he’s hung up on. One of those things

is the need for the priesthood. We had a great lesson with him in which we gave him a few

scriptures that got him thinking.

On Thursday we had the biggest driving day yet here in the mission. In the morning we drove an

hour south to Columbus to inspect four missionary apartments. A few of them took the “Golden

Brush away pretty seriously, but one apartment that has four elders living in it said they “may or

may not have forgotten that it was inspection day!” Although one of the elders’ apartments was

very clean, the lost the competition when I opened the refrigerator! Whew! I’m sure there were

things growing in there! So, the sisters were the winners this time. Then in the evening, we

drove an hour north to take two members of our ward to meet with the Stake President to have

their interviews to go to the temple to receive their endowments. We were supposed to be in that

same building an hour earlier than their appointments for our transfer meeting, so we told them

we would have to leave early. We explained to President Richards that we were driving them

and asked him if they could just sit in on the meeting since they would be there anyway. He said

it was fine. We expected them to just sit in the back row and wait out their time. We were

incredibly surprised when both Vicky and Steve spoke up and offered powerful suggestions of

ways that the Elders could improve their invitations to have members join them in their teaching

visits. We thought that the meeting might strengthen them, but it ended up the other way around!

We ended the week with our Friday morning in the ward garden helping Brother Adams pull

weeks! My gosh, everything grows so fast here in the humid climate. It’s only been five weeks

since we planted the tiny little collard green plants, and they are already ready to harvest.

Neither Elder Hintze nor myself have ever eaten a collard green, so we cut some and brought

them home. We’re planning to cook them this week. The cabbage will be ready to harvest in

another week. We realized the one little pot of basil that we planted will never be enough to

make soup in the fall, so we asked him for some space to plant basil. We bought the seeds and

we will be planting them this Friday. We really enjoy working in the garden.

We recently visited again with Brother Malone who has terminal cancer. He’s been feeling well

enough to mow his grass and drive his son to school events, so we encouraged him to come to

church whenever he feels up to it. We shared with him the story of the laborers in the vineyard

to help him to see that it makes no difference how late the hour when he comes back to the fold,

it just matters that he does. The Savior doesn’t care how long we’ve been gone. He will rejoice

when we return.

Have a wonderful week.

With love,

Elder and Sister Hintze