Going senior...

Hai!

Wow that does sound like a pretty churchy weekend. Although I guess my everyday is pretty churchy. It's like you guys are missionaries or something. Geez louise. That's cool you had a bunch of people at the temple on Saturday. It seems pretty true what dad always says or someone always says: some high percentage (99% or something...) of success is just showing up. [“85% of success in life is just showing up.”] Yeah you can tell I'm really familiar with the phrase. Whatever the case, you get the point.

Had a pretty decent week this week I suppose. The OuYang family is doing.. well.. ok. The good news is that Brother OuYang got baptized on Sunday and they came to church only an hour late! The bad news is that Sister OuYang decided at the last minute (last Tuesday) that she wasn't ready to be baptized since she's still a little too committed to her Buddhist traditions and feels that she needs more time before she can commit to getting baptism. Anyways, I'm still optimistic that she'll be ready by next month, but we'll keep working with her. The other bad news is that their son appears to be the naughtiest kid on the earth. He's absolutely ridiculous. Not that I can really blame him that much since he's only 4 years old but he has the most ridiculous temperament ever. He was like flipping out at church on Sunday for the first hour. Fortunately he quieted down a bit for sacrament meeting but he was still being rather ridiculous. Their daughter seemed to be doing pretty well during primary though. She brought her hamster which seemed to win her a lot of fast friends haha. Hopefully we can bring a couple people from the primary over to talk to the OuYangs during this week or next week along with some other 4 year-old kids so that Allen (their ridiculous 4 year-old) will be a little more comfortable going to primary. Also since we're only a branch, our primary program is combined with the English speaking ward primary since most of the little kids speak English. But the primary president only speaks English which is a bit of a bummer for this situation. Still though, good plan I think.

Unfortunately, this has all become my responsibility since Elder Luo is going to Hayward to be the Zone Leader there (the only Chinese speaking zone leader position in the mission) and I’m getting a new companion from Hong Kong named Elder Wu. Elder Wu has only been out for 2 transfers though so I'm being made senior companion which seems rather fast to be honest. I don't really want the responsibility, but I guess that's kind of when you get called to stuff like that since if I wanted to be senior companion I’m sure I'd stay junior the rest of my mission haha. Fortunately, I suppose the Lord figures I’m ready and I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that when the Lord calls he qualifies (Moses 6... ba) which I certainly hope proves to be the case. At least I'm pretty familiar with the geography of the downtown area and the public transportation has become pretty clear to me. Hopefully ,Elder Luo will leave his map with me. Or I should say his two halves of a map since it got all ripped up as a result of heavy use.
Whatever the case, I'm pretty excited that I get to stay in downtown since it really is one of the coolest areas in the mission. We really are having more and more success it seems. We have a couple other investigators with a lot of promise for baptism this next month which is really great. I just hope we don't end up having any more people tell us in the week before their baptism that they don't think they're ready all of a sudden.

Haven't gotten any mail from the Beijing pengyous but I can't really blame them since most of them probably don't know how to use the mail system. Qingwei and Dixon sent me an email but I told them I couldn't use email to contact them so would send them letters back. So I have their mailing addresses at least but I've basically just been too lazy to send them mail since p-days are rather busy...

That's awesome you're taking a class on American art at the art museum mom! Although I don't really understand what the word docent means, it sounds awfully sophisticated. Speaking of which, I found a world heritage sites book in our apartment today and was looking through it until I decided it was too apostate and stopped. Looked at the Angkor Wat page before I did though. Have to admit that place was pretty darn cool. Unfortunately I think my appreciation for the sites lessoned the more that we visited them haha. I guess that's always how it is though. Like how in art museums your eyes start to glaze over after the first two or three galleries.

Had a pretty good personal study session today in which I was reading in Joseph Smith history about his receiving revelation from James 1:5 (Preach My Gospel pg... 18?...) It just made me realize what a huge impact that one verse of scripture has had on our family and I guess the whole world. I don't think I would have any real faith in Jesus Christ without the Book of Mormon and First Vision as the foundation of my testimony. Not to say the Bible isn't really great but it really is true that a second/third witness makes the message so much more powerful.

Glad to hear Hu Jintao's visit went well dad. And that American diplomacy won the day by hammering the sleep-deprived Chinese negotiators into submission (although not literally I hope). Unfortunately I don't really know what a 4th communique thing is... I'm thinking you guys are giving my English language skills more credit than they warrant since you seem to keep using words I don't understand. In any case, there are quite a few Falun Gong practitioners here in San Francisco. They were having some random exercise session in this park in Chinatown on Saturday. It was pretty funny actually since there were like 40 Chinese ppl and then 1 white guy randomly in their midst haha. Interesting.

I guess I should go write my email to the president now. No need to worry about my being too cold though since it's probably around 60-70 degrees here every day lately. For some reason I wore my jacket today even though it's really nice outside... Basically one thing that is NOT wrong with San Francisco is it's weather.

K. Gotta go. Thanks for all your love/support/prayers. I love you guys! Have a great week!

-Ian