March 13, 2011
Well it only took me 3 hours but I finally finished reading your email mom! Haha just kidding... more like 2...
That's awesome michelle is there! Get me a buddy pass! I want to go to NY/DC to hang out for the weekend! Mostly cause I'm afraid michelle will steal away all my friends while I'm gone... which she probably WILL. So good at making friends... and stuff... too good...
Yeah heard all about the earthquake in Japan since they thought there'd be a small tsunami here so our district leader called and was like "don't get drowned..." even though I think it didn't end up coming... or if it did it was like a foot high... 8.9 is pretty huge though. I guess they're kind of expecting an earthquake of that magnitude happening here sometime in the near future... but fortunately we all have 72-hour kits handy so we should be good. Also that's amazingly lucky they were having zone conference at the time in Japan. Pretty good timing.
That's cool you're developing such an appreciation for art mom. Although I'm not sure if I'd really be able to share in the artistic revelry with you since everytime we'd go to museums my eyes would glaze over after the first hour or 2 and then I'd just like walk through like a zombie going "oh look (motioning to some masterpiece or other)... art... that's nice... let's go"...
As you will recall dad, I AM in america... and as such am in possession of said refrigerator. And said nifty refrigerator magnet will most certainly be a wonderful addition to our apartment's decor. Although most mornings I don't really think about all that much aside from how tired I am... especially since Benjamin Franklin stole an hour of our sleep yesterday which I wasn't too happy about... especially since Elder Luo and I forgot about daylight savings when it was actually in our benefit and so ended up being up an hour too early which was a bummer... more like a tragedy actually.
Whatever the case, I had a pretty good week here, unfortunately, however we had to drop a lot of baptismal dates. 2 were because we found out they live together (boyfriend and girlfriend) which made us think that we couldn't really justify keeping their baptism date for April 3 just because of how many changes they need to make in their lives before they could really meet the requirements. 1 is because she isn't returning our calls/texts and we assume that she either a) lost/forgot to charge her phone or b) heard some anti-mormon propaganda which kind of scared her off. And the last is because he isn't really up to coming to church because he works the night shift doing some kind of repair work on BART and gets off work at 8 AM on sunday morning. Also, his parents always make him take them to look at houses and he's not exactly consistent at picking up his phone which is another problem. However, we added one additional baptismal date which is looking fairly stable, especially considering she is on spring break next week and will have more time to come to church and hopefully make it a habit.
Coming to church however is still a major challenge for all our investigators, since it really isn't ever very convenient for anyone and less so for students who have a lot of homework and no car. We are really going to do our best this week to help our investigators recognize the importance of keeping the sabbath day holy... which we also worked on last week, but this Sunday I guess was just too soon/too busy for most of our investigators.. kind of annoying... but.. whatever...
Fortunately, the one investigator who did come, Brother Zhou, is super solid. He has quit smoking for a whole week now and is still going strong. It's really investigators like Brother Zhou, and sister Ying (his girlfriend who was baptized two weeks ago) that make missionary work so great. Just really prepared people who you can actually see their faith growing. Unfortunately, for each one of those investigators, it seems like there are 5 or 10 others who aren't big on keeping commitments and therefore don't have much progression. It really does strengthen my faith to see investigators like brother Zhou though who didn't even believe in God before he began meeting with us and who's faith has just been getting stronger and stronger because of his commitment to reading the scriptures, praying, and coming to church.
Elder Wu and I have really kind of given up contacting places other than AAU (Academy of Art University... don't ask me why they have both Academy and University in the name... seems rather redundant to say the least) just because it's so effective. I'd guess that at least 30% of the student body is from China and it seems like for every hour we spend there we get at least two fairly solid potential investigators. I don't know if it's some natural spirituality of art students or something but a lot of them seem very interested in the gospel. Of course it also doesn't hurt that our downtown office is literally right across the street from their campus which just makes it especially convenient.
One thing that Elder Wu and I are finding becoming more and more challenging is finding members to come along to lessons since our branch is pretty small and we have a lot of female investigators who we really need a 3rd male present for, of which the branch is also rather short of. We're always afraid of using the same people too often since two members who were baptized in Sunset before I got here have already kind of been driven into inactivity likely because of how often the missionaries called them. Which I don't really get because they could always just say no... Whatever the case, it seems like our branch has a little problem with retention since a lot of the people who have been baptized in the past year or so have already gone less active which I find very annoying. Especially since we really have enough less active members in the church as it is and it doesn't really do very much good to baptize people into inactivity.
For example, both investigators Elder Luo and I baptized have already gone inactive. One because he was sick for a long time and is now preparing to go back to China, and another just because his kids are so against going to church and his wife isn't a fan either. Mostly the kids though since they are kind of ruled by their 9 year old daughter and 4 year old son which really really frustrates me just because there's no way their family is going to see any changes in their lives unless they actually LIVE the gospel and I feel like they think our message just didn't really work for them... when they don't realize that it's not working because they're not working at it. Just frustrating.
Anyways, for the most part, things are going fairly well. Also, Elder Wu just typed this super long letter to president wade and since we're using macs, he did ctrl C to copy it instead of command C and then consequently lost it all... And naturally is rather frustrated as a result. Fortunately it's just a letter to president wade and not a master's thesis paper... which would be worse... although I don't why he'd be typing one of those...
Whatever the case, thanks for your love and support and emails and stuff! Say hi to James for me and tell him I'll take extra long on my homecoming talk for him.
Love you!
-Ian
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