Dear Mum and Dad,

This has been a fun week. Very busy, but fun nonetheless.

I have as of yet not had my steak with President Van Dam. I'm not exactly sure when he will arrange that with me, but I expect it'll be closer to Mission Conference, which is in about three weeks.

Sounds like Bournemouth was a lot of fun. It's nice to know the weather was good where you are. Summer is certainly on the way here - it's getting very, very hot. Remembering last summer when I walked around in the heat for up to eight hours a day, I'm not really anticipating the full heat of the season, but there's not much that can be done to avoid it - I'm hoping that it will rain, soon, and cool things down a little for a few days.

Today is Moves day, but Elder Marshall and I are staying together. This will be his very last move, so he's going to "die" and I'll "kill" him. It ought to be fun - over a year ago, I "killed" his trainer too. I like the poetic justice there. More poetic justice is soon arriving as Elder Bagley, my old companion (who I trained) moves into our District. So he'll probably be around to see me "die" next Move. I saw him born and he will see me die.

A lot of unexpected things are happening around the mission this Moves. The new Mission President, President Chan, will start his service in July, so President Van Dam's getting ready to leave. He's called a missionary in his last move to be a new Assistant, and has called my dear former companion, Elder Liu, to be a Zone Leader. Elder Liu was my junior companion in Macau only three months ago and hadn't been a District Leader yet - we're all speculating that he will be the next Assistant, which doesn't surprise me in the least, as he's one of (if not the) most amazing missionaries I've served around.

This week I had an interesting Pass-Off experience that I think is worth telling. As Zone Leader, I need to do pass-offs with missionaries working towards passing off the Missionary lessons to check their progress. A long time ago, when I was District Leader in Tai Po, I had a pass-off with a new missionary called Elder Nelson. It was his first move, and on his second attempt I passed him off.

When I came to Kwai Fong this Move, over half a year later, I found that he hadn't progressed any further in his pass-offs, because the district leader after I'd left had been very strict with him and he'd decided he didn't really want to try any more. I encouraged him to push forward with his pass offs, because I know he's a good teacher and that his Chinese is very good. So now at the end of this Move, he had passed off the second and third lesson and was ready for his Zone Leader checkup pass-off.

As we sat talking about it before we started, I asked him which lesson he felt was the hardest to teach. He said that the second lesson, the Plan of Salvation, was hardest when teaching missionaries in pass-offs, but the first lesson, the Restoration, was hardest when teaching real people. I thought that the difference was interesting and was reminded that pass-off lessons are never the same as real lessons. All at once, a prompting came to my mind.

"How about this," I asked, "why don't we go out on the street, stop a person, you can teach the Restoration, and that can count as your pass-off?"

Elder Nelson agreed, so off we went. We hadn't walked very far before I started to doubt myself - could we actually stop someone in such a short period of time? I've wandered around for hours without any success before - such a short period of time to find in, only fifteen minutes, might not yield results, and I would have wasted Elder Nelson's pass-off time. I told him that if we hadn't stopped anyone before we reached the top of a set of stairs we were walking up, we'd sit down in the shade of a tree and he could teach me a lesson on a bench.

Right then we met with a girl in her twenties heading off to university in Tsing Yi, Elder Nelson's current area. Unlike most Hong Kong people, it wasn't that difficult to convince her that she had time to stop, and I felt a special spirit in her. Elder Nelson taught her a Restoration which was a little more in depth than we usually have time to go over on the street, and she responded positively. We exchanged contact details and I passed her number over to the Sister Missionaries.

Elder Nelson did a good job, so I passed him, but I think I was even happier about the way the pass-off went than he was - I had felt a prompting of the Spirit and acted on it, and as a result, instead of teaching a practice lesson, we'd both had the chance to bear testimony of the First Vision to a prepared soul, and we had been able to invite someone to come unto Christ.

Yesterday I received a copy of a biographical DVD about President Monson I ordered entitled On the Lord's Errand. On the back of the DVD case is a quote which from President Monson which says, to paraphrase, "The sweetest experience I know is to follow a prompting of the Spirit and later find out that I was acting as an answer to someone's prayer or someone's need. I want the Lord to know that if there is an errand He needs run, Tom Monson will run that errand for Him." I want the same to be said of Matt Loffhagen.

On an unrelated topic, the other day I met an older Chinese man on the street who said he was from Leeds. I was thrilled to hear that and told him that I'd be starting at Leeds University this coming October. He said that his son is attending that university right now. I was happy to hear that there will definitely be a lot of Chinese people around for me to chat with after the mission - I definitely don't want to forget Cantonese.

Anyway, I love you all and pray hard about each one of you. When you see them, please say thank you to Grandma and Grandad, who have sent me a birthday card.

Love,

Elder Matthew Loffhagen