Eating Insects


This week was crazy and it flew by. It's pretty cool because when Elder Graham and I got here 3 weeks ago, we had 0 people to teach and we had a couple days where we were just finding all day long. But the Lord has blessed us and we've been finding people and now we are so busy with appointments that we hardly have time for finding. Things are moving forward and I'm just loving my time here in the city. 


We always go around the campus and talk to people and one day there was a stand for free ice cream so obviously we went over to get some. Then the guy opens the bucket of ice cream and it looks so good. It's a nice strawberry flavor and on a hot day it sounded perfect. But then he told us that the point of the free ice cream is to try an alternate food source: insects. The guy took a Tupperware full of crickets and mealworms and liberally dumped them into the ice cream. It was disturbing but at that point we wanted ice cream so we just watched while he mixed the bugs in and then gave us each a scoop. I figured since I used to have a lizard that would eat mealworms and seemed to enjoy them, I could try them too. Honestly they had like no taste and the ice cream was fire. I didn't think I'd eat bugs in Australia but it wasn't bad.


We were teaching a lesson about growing faith. We teach a lot of these Chinese students who are insanely smart and love science so the seed analogy and 'experimenting on the word of God' works pretty well. Anyway, we were in the lesson with this girl named Aurora and we want to get the analogy started. We said 'so pretend you have a seed. What will you do to make it grow?' She told us she would water it and give it sunlight. Okay good answer, just what we wanted. Then we ask 'how do you know it will grow? It's just a little seed, what makes you want to water it and hope it will turn into a tree?' since we wanted to go into how faith is hope for things which aren't seen. But, after we asked that question she responded with a biology lecture about cell duplication and literally how she knows the seed will grow. It was pretty funny, this girl is a genius and it made all of us laugh. But it ended up being a fire lesson. Another analogy we used to explain faith in God was I told her to look out the window and ask her what she could see. She told us she could see trees. I asked her why and she gave the complex answer I wanted, she said because the light from the sun was bouncing off the tree into her eyes. Then I asked if she could see the sun. She said no, from that angle the sun was out of view. But she knew the sun was there because she could see the tree. I told her God works like that too. We might not be able to see Him, but because of other things in our lives that we CAN see, we can know that He is real. It worked really well and she was excited to try it out for herself.



While on tradeoffs with Elder Bennett, we went back for lunch and saw a massive orange wasp carrying a giant huntsman spider up the wall. It was the crazy freaky stuff you always think about when you hear Australia. Anyway, we obviously took a video to remember it and went on with our day. Then later we were finding and sat down next to this Chinese girl on a bench. We were going to get started with the Restoration but then before u started talking I noticed that she was holding two little test tubes. I asked what they were for and she showed me the inside: spiders. She was just carrying around these spiders that she had just caught on campus. So I pulled out the video of the spider wasp that we had just seen and she got SO excited and started going off about its biological genus and Latin name and I was just thinking dang your English is better than mine. Then she let her spiders out and they jumped on us a bit but it worked out. It was just insane, this girl literally shrieked with joy when we showed her pictures of all the spiders we've found in Sydney so far. Then we connected it to the gospel and it turned into a fire lesson. Elder Bennett doesn't speak Chinese, and near the end I said a prayer with the girl in Chinese. I asked God to help her feel the Spirit right then and to help her know that God loves her. Elder Bennett didn't understand anything in the prayer, but right after we were done, he looked at her and asked her "how do you feel right now?" Then he told her that her feeling was a testimony that God loves her. It was 100% the gift of tongues helping Elder Bennett to know what to say. I felt the Spirit a lot and was grateful to see that miracle.

Also my old companion Elder Song finally went home. He's 28 and he was out for almost 26 months because of issues getting back to China. He called me from the airport to ask me my final advice for getting married, since his goal is to have a kid by the time he's 30. He's probably on a date already. 


A cool thing this week that I haven't experienced before was facing actual adversity against missionary work as enforced by people with authority. The college campus we proselyte on is public and it's 100% legal to be there, but not everyone seems to recognize it. Usually our area is the street outside the university, but we started walking on campus and realized it is more effective. However, sometimes people would call security on us since they don't like our church. It was a good feeling to stand our ground and say that we had the right to be there when the security showed up and told us to leave. We weren't argumentative, but firm in what we knew. The security guard started off telling us to leave, but realized that we have religious freedom and couldn't. At the end, he asked what we were even doing and we taught him the Restoration. God won't let us fail.

Because of the Mardi Gras parade and festival, we weren't allowed outside at all for two days straight. This thing is crazy, it seems like every single homosexual person in Sydney come outs on the street, gets whacked out drunk and just goes crazy. It went on for 2 days. We spent our time calling people to follow up with them and then when that was over we played a lot of ping pong. 


Time seriously flies by so fast. I am still learning more and more Chinese since I get to speak it all the time. It's been one of the biggest blessings on my mission to have the opportunity to learn that language. I am just so happy. I get to spend all my time just sending it and giving my all. There are still trials but they are 'swallowed up in the joy of Christ'. I love being a missionary. 


哇这个地区好好～
Elder Halverson 






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