Hello! Can you believe it? I feel
like yesterday I just arrived in GaoXiong and now the month is halfway over.
That means Spencer has just arrived home from his trip to Taiwan and hope
he had a blast. I'm glad he got to experience what I get to experience
daily in this beautiful place. Sounds like the family had lots of fun
with camps this week and I hope a lot was learned from those experiences.
With nothing else we'll get right on into a little bit of what happened
this week.
Tuesday we began by having a Zone
Training Meeting (ZTM). It's a brand new thing they have, it's basically
a District Training Meeting but with the entire Zone. There we learned
how to be Qualigent missionaries, to get quality investigators for our diligence.
Super good! It was there that we all learned how we can better
teach the 1st lesson of the Restoration to help our investigators understand
the importance of the God's power and authority and the need for a restoration.
Later on in the day we visited with a guy named Mark. He has been
around missionaries for a while just because he worked at a Giant store fixing
their bikes. We got talking and he absolutely loves his family. He
mentioned he is giving his young family what he never got to experience in his
life growing up as a kid. We taught him of a loving Heavenly Father that
has prepared a path for his family which leads to eternal happiness. He
is willing to give it a shot and even started off great by volunteering to
pray. Right after the prayer he stopped and said, "Wow, that felt
good! I got this nice, warm, peaceful feeling during that prayer."
That was just another testimony builder that God truly does hear our
prayers, and he lets us know through our feelings that he is listening to every
word we say.
Thursday we sat down with our Michael
Jackson loving boy, Mr. Liu, and his younger brother. He already has a
Christian background, but has been baptized yet, and absolutely loves reading
the Bible. Well, so today we shared with him the message of the
Restoration and used what we learned from our ZTM in this lesson with him.
Well, it went super well. It helped him understand more of
what Christ did while he was on the earth, the importance of the authority, why
there was an apostasy, and the need for a restoration. It helped him
realize that baptism needs a authority holding person to administer this
ordinance. He then realized that our church is the only church with God's
authority and asked us if he could join our church and be baptized. Wow!
It was so awesome to see that teaching those important parts this way has
so much power!
Friday was such a fun day! Went on
exchanges with Elder Nickell and had such a hard-working, fun, fun day.
We visited with an 82 year old beibei from China who is so willing to
accept the gospel, despite his age. Even though his accent was super
thick and we couldn't understand a whole lot, the Spirit was still present and
strong. Before continuing the rest of our day, we stopped off at one of
the few Costco's in Taiwan. Mmm mmm good! We then spent the rest of the
night visiting and strengthening the faith of a few of their less-active
members.
Saturday we headed to a huge mall in his
area for a lesson. First of all, I have never seen a bigger mall in my
life than this (its called Dream Mall). Second of all, I have never
taught a lesson in the middle of a beer fest in my life. Well, we went to
the quietest place we could find and taught this man about Joseph
Smith and the Book of Mormon. It seemed he was only visiting to ask
thousands of questions about us, but I felt the situation was handled great and
we were able to help him realize the importance that comes from reading the
Book of Mormon and praying. From that lesson we exchanged back and just spent
the rest of the night hittin' the streets and finding some new investigators.
Sunday we had one of our investigators,
Brother Ke, go through his baptismal interview and he passed! I don't
know this man a whole lot but it's exciting to see his desire to follow
Christ's example by being baptized. He has a lot of support from ward
members which is the best thing for him right now.
Well, that's about all. Love you
all, miss you all, and hope all is well with you wherever you may be. All
is well here and there is no better place that I could be than in Taiwan.
Take care!
Love the One and Only,
司馬長老
