Hello Family and Friends,
How are all ya'll doin'? Wow October is officially half way over. It seemed like last week it just started. WOW!!! Hope all of you are lovin' life cause I sure am. I'm loving life as a missionary, even though it’s a rough, tough life but the Lord is here helping me and will help all of you. We all will come across our own little challenges or rough patches, but as we remember the Lord and turn to him, he can help us go through those times. When we turn to the Lord, we truly will feel His love for us. For me, honestly, when I feel the Lord's love for me, I want to share that love with every single person on this small little island. So, things are going great here in Taiwan and the work continues to go forward. This past week went pretty well...
As I mentioned last Sunday, our Wu dixiong got baptized. He wasn't able to get confirmed a member of the church that day because the bishop was out of town. He was willing to wait an entire week to be confirmed a member of the Church, and receive the Gift of the Holy Ghost. We confirmed him before that exercise activity that went on last Monday, and he was so excited to come. After the activity he was so happy, and I don't know why. I think it may be because he was so excited to interact with the members here in Taiwan, and let those new friends know that he was fresh out of the waters of baptism. So that was awesome I got to see that.
Wednesday we had a pretty interesting first lesson, with a guy we found in a pretty interesting way. So a few weeks ago we advertised our FREE ENGLISH CLASS at Fengjia University. One of the students while trying to pull his bike out from a rack knocked over all of our missionary bikes, some of the bike parts even broke off. He was so sorry and said he would give us money to pay of the damage. Elder Ipsen, the newest missionary in our District was like, "Nah its alright, come to English class though." So this kid has actually come the past couple weeks, and we finally sat down with him. He believes in science and so we started with the basics: pray and reading the Book of Mormon. He said the closing prayer for us, and when he ended he said, "He hasn't answered me yet." We laughed it off and told him the Lord will answer in his own time.
Thursday we met with our good friend Arthur, gave him his English Book of Mormon, and taught him about God's Plan of Salvation for him. He had lots of questions, but this lesson was able to answer those for him. What I've heard so far is that he has been reading lately, but he has started asking his family members back in Canada about Mormons. He has been getting all this information from them about how we can't drink soda, how we are a cult, and all this other stuff. But as Mom said, we could reference the church websites, mormon.org and lds.org to invite people to learn more about the church and to help confirm that what we are teaching as missionaries.
So lately as a mission, we have set specific standards of excellence. These standards cause us missionaries to stretch and work really really hard. As this past week was nearing its end, we were a little behind on a few of these standards. We set a goal to get a certain amount of lessons done on Saturday, and let me just tell you it was gonna be rough. So that day I constantly was praying to help us accomplish that goal. We went through the day teaching lessons, sitting down with people just to pray, doing everything we could to accomplish that goal. Looking back on that day's activities we realized that we had accomplished that goal! The Lord is truly on our side to help us in this missionary work. Even though we may not see these people ever again, we have placed that seed inside of them. This seed may seem small now, but we never know what the Lord has in mind for them in the future.
I'm so glad to be here serving. I am loving every single second of it. Even though I may lose my super awesome companion this next week, and even though these people are super hard to understand and converse with, I love it all! Keep working hard with work, school, or missionary work, and never forget the Lord. ENDURE TO THE END ELDER ANTHONY SMITH!!!!!!!!! With lots and lots of love, Elder Nick Smith
