Oh family. Family is the greatest thing ever. Elder Sutherland found a line in Preach My Gospel that says that "Heaven is only the continuation of the ideal family" or something like that. I love you guys!

This week has been full of all sorts of great and not so great things, but it has yielded much fruit! 

Here are the big updates and stories.

We celebrated Elder Jackson's birthday at Rugby this week, but it was also Elder Sutherland's yesterday! To celebrate that we went to a nice restaurant called Tom's Too and I paid for his steak. A lot of the other Elders also came, including Elder and Sister Beus, and it was awesome. 

Last Monday we went to Bro. Kong's house for family night, it was fun but tonight we are going to try harder to do something to help the younger kids stay interested (any advice would be appreciated!).

We had a very interesting lesson with Jerry's family, as Elder Beus had asked if he could make a chart to explain church organization. We thought it would be a smaller thing, but he ended up teaching the entire lesson with us translating. It basically covered everything we were apprehensive to bring up, but it was done in a way that it couldn't have been better for them. We'll have to really see how Jerry feels about it, as the main message was that God is the head of this church, not man.

We also met a new family that we are teaching, the head is sort of a matriarch named Caterina, and they live out next to Ingang. We originally met one guy there who invited us back, his name being Paul, and they're awesome. One of the young adult sons, Ari, was saying he'd always been confused about why there we so many churches and wanted to know which one was right, so he was extremely excited when we said we could tell him the answer. More on them next week!

We had a fun day on Friday with Splits with the Zone Leaders. I got to do the 40 minute bike ride out to Rantau Panjang with Elder Jackson and had a lot of fun lessons out there. As we were leaving, there were kids with these crazy firecrackers that sounded like gunshots without casings. One thing I guess I should let you know, on the news here there's apparently been some strange incidents of people being taken by chinese gangsters who gas people and take their organs. Just so you know, and we are taking precautions and being very careful when needed.

On that note, have you heard about MH17? Is that crazy or what?

We have been working pretty consistently with Lena this week, and she is getting better. It's hard for her as she is still learning to learn. Kenyang however is on date for this next Saturday, and he is very ready. We'll be having family night at Acui's house again tonight.

Saturday was a branch social, which apparently nobody planned. So we ended up doing Musical Chairs, Karaoke, and eating, but it was still fun.

During Branch Council, District President Chua said we could request for Wheel chairs for Desmond and Sebastian, Ingang's kids, which would be really cool if we could do that. 

Yesterday we were able to go with Brother Kajup to see a less active named Entalai. He is really cool, expressed a desire to return to church, owns a car and has work off on Sunday! That's really cool, and hopefully we can see him there next week.

Anyway, this week has been great over all. Elder Sutherland is an amazing guy and I absolutely love working with him. He seriously has been one of the most influential parts of my mission so far, all the way for the better.

I love you so much! 

-Elder Christensen