Week Thirteen: Fourth Week in Taiwan and Things are Moving Along

Hello Family and Friends!

 

This week has been pretty wonderful. It started out great with a very relaxing P-Day, followed by many miracles! 

Street in Tainan.  Source: tripadvisor.com via Google Images.

On Tuesday, we did companion exchanges. Our district includes all of Yongkang. Elder Sumsion and I have one half, Elder Ng and Elder Peterson have the other half, and there are two Sister missionaries, Sister Lai and Sister Wilkins that cover the whole area(which is huge, by the way. they are super hard-working). I went with Elder Ng, our district leader. We switched at about 2 pm Tuesday and went contacting on one of the main roads in their area. After that, we advertised for our English class, had dinner, then we knocked on doors. It was awesome. The second door we knocked on, there was a man who opened up and asked us to come in. He was such a nice guy. We talked with him for a bit about what missionaries do and got to know him a bit. Apparently he won awards in school for his calligraphy and said he could teach me if I wanted. I told him that would be awesome so I'll have to talk with him another P-day about that. He also had 2 kids and a wife so if all goes well, the other elders will be able to teach them as a family! That would be so great! After that, we met with a college student and taught him the first lesson about God and the restoration of the church. He was from mainland China. He was a really cool guy, if only a little bit shy, and he set up a time for a return appointment so that was a great experience! After that, we went home for the night. The next morning, we did studies and since mine are really long the first 6 weeks, we just had lunch and then traded back companions the next day. So yeah cool experience!

English class went well the next day. I shared an article with the students that Elder Ballard wrote about keeping your life in balance. It's really cool when I do that because we can go through and explain words and phrases so they're learning English, but I can also explain the principles that are being explained so it's both spiritual and academic. So great. The only downside is that it usually takes forever to get through the whole article so I only have about 2 or 3 minutes at the end to wrap it up/ discuss the article as a whole. Regardless, a couple students expressed thanks that I shared the article and one even went so far as to say it was "inspiring". Now the trick is to be able to get that reaction when I'm speaking Chinese! In any case, I'll try not to let that go to my head;).

The rest of the week was just about average. We have two investigators right now with a baptismal date set. One is named Liao and he's from Hong Kong. He came here for school and he's so excited to learn about the church. It's awesome! He's cruising through the Book of Mormon and he's even researching the church which can be a bad thing if he searches in the wrong places(like blogs where people go on anti-Mormon rants and such), but all the information he asked us about was pretty solid so I'm not too worried. He's accepted and understood everything we've taught him really well. Most Chinese people have a really hard time with a lot of the gospel concepts, but he's getting it no problem. He not only understood the story of Adam and Eve and why they had to fall and everything, but he was also trying to find deeper meaning and analyze it like you would an English text. It was nuts! He also had a really awesome question when we were explaining the different kingdoms of glory. He asked us "If the Celestial kingdom is perfect, will we just be at a standstill? What will we do there if we're perfect? That doesn't sound very fun to just do nothing forever." We explained that even after we're perfect, we'll still be improving and working towards higher degrees of knowledge and glory. It was so cool to see him have that big of a grasp on the concepts.

Our other investigator is Chen. He's super busy with business meetings and things like that so he's been meeting with missionaries on and off since July. When we started teaching him, he'd already been taught the first 3 lessons. Yesterday, we taught him part of the 4th lesson which is about the commandments. We taught him prayer and scripture study and were planning on teaching him baptism and following the prophet too. However, when we asked the member who was helping us teach how keeping commandments had blessed him and he talked about the Word of Wisdom and mentioned specifically no tea, no coffee, no smoking, etc., we figured we should probably talk about that instead. Apparently, the hardest commandments to teach in Taiwan are Word of Wisdom, because everyone drinks tea as part of the culture, and the 10 commandments, because there's a tradition here of ancestor worship. So we were pretty worried about it, but when we committed Chen to live the Word of Wisdom, he was like "Yeah, sure, no problem. It would be easy to do a lot of this stuff sparingly, but not at all is going to be kind of hard. But yeah, I'll do it." It was a miracle. We are truly so blessed to be able to teach him and see how the changes he's making in his life are blessing him. Oh! He was also saying that he didn't really know if the Book of Mormon is true yet, but that he wanted to know so we shared Alma 32 with him about how you need nothing more than a desire to know, but if you let that desire work in you, it will develop and grow until you know for sure. He loved that and even asked us if he could read the rest of that chapter to which we enthusiastically replied "Yes! Of course!" It was so great. Such a great end to the week. 

Anyway, that's about all for the week. After I finish emailing, we're going to this place called "The hometown of the mango" as a little adventure so expect lots of pictures of that next week. Until then, know that I love you all and am so thankful for your support. Adieu!

Elder Brendan Smith