Family, Friends, Acquaintances,
It's been another great week with Elder Zhao. Also I found France:
That's right, Salmon. I'm coming for you. Just kidding. But this bridge does have a nice Paris feel. I thought they did a good job. But anyway, this week has been alright. Being a senior companion is still a little stressful, especially when you feel like you aren't having tons of success. I feel like we worked pretty hard all week, but then when it got to last night, I looked back and thought about what we actually accomplished this week and it was kind of discouraging. I think most of that is because we haven't quite figured out how to channel our hard work into which activities and at which times. I think I'm also lacking in boldness which is a fatal flaw of any leader, large or small. As far as what we DID accomplish this week, it goes a little like this:
Our main investigators right now are Brother Tang and Brother Lu. Brother Tang is a guy I set up with and met my first day in Tainan. He's awesome, but his work is quite busy so he hasn't been to church yet. We're praying for next week. He's set to be baptized on the 4th of October. He's met some opposition from his wife(she found some false information about our church online and was kind of bugging him about it), but he's still very determined to find his own answer. He was pretty devout Buddhist before so he's somewhat familiar with the way spiritual things work. That's nice. Elder Lu is a recent convert's husband. They were set to be baptized on the same day, but he backed out last minute. We met with him and the Bishop(who's awesome, by the way) on Friday and Brother Lu shared with us that he still has some doubts. He loves the church and I think he really has a strong testimony of how it can bless him, but he's still a little shaky on whether there really is life after death or whether Joseph Smith really was a prophet or not. It's tough, but I think we're getting closer with him.
We also met with a guy named Brother Wang. He's a member, but he lives SUPER far away from the chapel so he hasn't been to church in a while. He was baptized last year, but he said at the time he didn't have any super strong feelings towards it. The way he described it sounded a lot like the plot of that Jim Carrey movie "Yes, Man". He said, "It was 'yes, yes!' everything was always yes!" However, recently he's had some cool experiences with prayer that have helped him realize that this gospel has something to it. We've got high hopes for him to come back to church. That's about it.
Being in an apartment with 2 other elders is pretty odd, but not too odd. You just get interrupted during studies a lot more and it's more loud all the time. But that's ok. I think I've already described the other elders in my apartment, but in case I haven't, one is Elder Heaton. He looks like the 11th Doctor from Doctor Who, mannerisms and everything. So yeah, that's pretty wild. Elder Crook is from Portland and he's a pretty funny guy. We both share a love for the Northwest and he's a nice guy so we get along real well.
Love you all!!
-Elder Smith
P.S. This is called the 美的冰 which means "Beautiful Ice". I'm not super clear on what all was inside of it, but it was pretty tasty.
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