Hey Mom and dad! Howsit?!
That's too bad you can't go to Ukraine mom... Luggage handlers are pretty important... What is Michelle thinking going without one!?!... Although I wouldn't probably recommend you... considering the San Francisco fiasco of the past couple days :D. It was good to hear from you though on that day that that airplane flew by and I heard your silent voice saying hi and stuff.
So in other news, I'm being made Zone Leader in Hayward which is exciting I suppose. I actually am pretty excited to go there since I'm gonna be companions with.... ELDER LUO AGAIN!!! Hahaha. Pretty funny. Elder Luo is the man though so it'll be really fun... I just hope I don't fall into trainee mode again after being three transfers of senior companion in charge man. Point is, I've heard there are like no GuangDong people and lots of Northerners there which is really exciting cause, not that I'm racist or anything, but I'm really tired of GuangDong people saying things to me such as "M SAAEEEK! MOU HENK CHOIIIII!!! SEEEN FAT GAOUUU!!!" And people who speak mandarin are just much easier to communicate with and generally much more receptive. Although my Cantonese was coming along pretty well here... not that it was that useful since I could only really contact in Cantonese but... still... pretty funny language.
Had a fairly disappointing week this week... but I think that's just because of how successful the week before was since we still had more lessons than we have had all the weeks this transfer except for last week so I can't complain too much. We did have quite a few lessons fall through this week though which was rather annoying but I guess that's to be expected in missionary work. Although something I've decided to start doing more of is just letting our investigators and those we set up appointments with really have a concept of the value of our time so they don't think they can just not come to our appointments whenever they want. So I guess we'll see how that works out. In any case, we had a disappointing week with regards to our investigator sister Meng. She seems to be encountering a lot of opposition that's really testing her testimony. Which I suppose is good to have before the baptism rather than after but is really frustrating in any case. We're not entirely sure as to the exact nature of the concerns but there are definitely a lot there. Unfortunately we were only able to meet with her once this week since she got really busy all of a sudden but I hope that Elder Lee and Elder Ho will be able to keep working with her in helping her progress towards baptism. And perhaps give her a little more time and not rush her into something she feels unprepared for... which is tough for me to do since I'm generally rather impatient with people who want to put off baptism but I think is probably necessary in her case.
Our other investigator with a baptismal date, Sister Luo, is doing very well. Despite the fact she is 68 years old, she is in excellent shape and has a really active mind. We ran into her as we were running around the lake the other day and she seemed to be running faster than we were haha. She is building stronger and stronger faith and although she mentioned some concerns about her baptism this sunday being too soon, I think they are fairly easily resolvable.
We've had to drop a few investigators this week as well just because they aren't very willing to meet with us again which is always frustrating but rather necessary and probably is a signal to me that I need to improve my teaching skills to really get them more engaged. Although sometimes it really is kind of out of our hands since we had an excellent lesson the other day with these two high school students and they have since stood us up and ignored our phone calls so... guess you never know.
On another note, we had a pretty hilarious church meeting yesterday. First off, in sacrament meeting we had this Cantonese speaker give a talk which nobody understood and then there was this return missionary from Dallas Texas who's dad had remarried a ShangHai lady so he was in the Chinese branch giving a kind of homecoming address. I translated for his talk which went pretty well on the translation part (I defnitely have seen the Lord's help in my learning Chinese here, kind of Shenqi actually...) but the talk was just really hilarious. He was talking about charity and shared this hilarious story about how one time he got 60 dollars from home for Christmas and then took his district to lunch at a buffet. And then told the waitress he didn't want his friends to know it was him paying but they found out anyways but it was ok cause he still felt good about it. And through doing this, he learned a valuable lesson about charity. Pretty funny. Then we had this combined relief society/Priesthood meeting for the third hour in which we had a couple from the stake that came and talked to us about the 12 steps of alcoholics anonymous which the church has adopted and how it's basically a cure-all for everything. Just such a random meeting that seemed like it would've been more in place at a workshop or something.
Whatever the case, yes I did get that stuff in the mail and thanks for reminding me cause I should probably send that shuffle back to you today I guess. We're going out to eat at this really great ice cream place in Piedmont with the senior couple who is in our district, the Mayos. They are awesome. Don't know if I've told you about them yet but I think I could probably spend paragraphs trying to describe them and still not do them justice.
Alright, well I hope you get the pirate crisis worked out there dad. Sounds pretty HAIRY!
Thanks for your letters!
I love you!
-Ian
Monday, May 30, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
The End of the World...or almost...
Herrowwww! Happy Birthday dad!!!
Man that judgement day thing was publicized really really well. Everyone talked about it this week except mom! At least it didn't actually happen so you can still celebrate your birthday this year... especially since I sent a letter...
I didn't know he was based in Oakland! Haha! That's awesome. There were loads of billboards around advertising the Judgement though. Can't say I was too surprised at the result considering how the Bible says that no one knows or can know... which kind of makes me wonder what Harold Camping is reading... He probably wrote his own book of scripture... I guess this is why we need a restoration of the true church of Jesus Christ. Good thing we had one...
Had a very very excellent week. Probably the best week I have had on my mission so far. At least in terms of lessons taught and finding new investigators and almost every key indicator...except maybe church... I don't even know how it happened but Elder Lee and I just taught so many lessons. Last week we had a total of 8 and this week we had 18. Pretty big increase. I guess I'd have to ascribe it to better planning and more following up. I really believe the Lord is blessing us in this area though. I can truly feel the Spirit working through us as we teach and helping our investigators to progress.
Lately, it has really become apparent to me the importance of commitments like reading the Book of Mormon and praying daily. We visited a less active last night who is the father of a really great member and who's wife is also active. He's also from my hometown Beijing haha so it was fun to talk with him. However, as we began teaching, it quickly became really apparent that he had joined the church for friends and not really for God or out of any actual conversion. Because many of his friends are now less active or have moved away, he's just kind of stopped coming. We invited him to start praying daily and reading the Book of Mormon which he committed to do. I'm confident if he does follow through with it, it will truly increase his faith and cause him to actually become converted. We're gonna follow up with him today and a couple more times this week. It also was kind of a wake-up call to me as to the importance of making sure my investigators really are doing those simple things that will ensure that they develop real faith and experience true conversion because it would appear that that was one point that the missionaries who worked with brother Li overlooked during the teaching process...
We added a whole host of new investigators this week including 2 families, a couple english class students, two high school students who recently immigrated to the States (had a really great lesson with them yesterday), and an older man from Taiwan who's in the states for a year visiting his kids. We also did a lot better finding members to come along to our lessons. Overall, just a very good week.
I think on the whole that being a missionary really has been such a growing experience. I think I really have the confidence to succeed and get things done. Something Elder Lee and I have been working on lately is having more unity in our teaching. In some lessons, our investigator will say a lot of stuff that Elder Lee doesn't really totally understand and so the language barrier is definitely a factor but overall I probably just talk too much. Plus some investigators just really really like to talk and then I feel like I have to step in and take control or the lesson will go who knows where... not where we want it in any case.
We taught this really hilarious guy from PinDong, Taiwan yesterday (which incidentally, was probably both in your's and joels mission dad). He came to church and then we taught him afterwards and he was saying all this stuff like "I think church is too long and you should definitely start off by teaching people the gospel and then have them come to church cause getting them to come to church straight off might just be too much and then they won't understand anything and just be really confused and uninterested... I mean.. for me, I can accept it and I can understand... but this is just a suggestion for other people to try to spread the gospel to..." Of course he was obviously talking about himself but I was like "yeah I totally agree, the only reason we invited you to church right off the bat is because we know that you're a man of deep understanding and that you'd really be able to handle the 3 hour church experience... for other people I definitely agree with your sugestion that we should prep them more (we really should've prepped him better but didn't really have much of a chance...) but for you we knew that you were already advanced enough to be able to handle it..." I basically just had to kind of play off his ego (which is really really big!) the whole lesson so that we could start teaching him... we'll work on humility later haha. Also, everytime we introduced him to another person from Taiwan, he was like "oh you're from the RICH part!!! TAIBEI!!! See!?! I'm not welcome here!!! From poverty-stricken pindong!!!" It was pretty funny. Anyways, we set up another appt. with him for wednesday so it should be alright. Anyways, his daughter owns this frozen yogurt place in chinatown which is where we met him so hopefully we can get some free frozen yogurt out of it... which is the only real reason we're teaching him anyway... Jk!
Anyways, I'd better go write the Joel and Michelle since they both wrote me this week! Well I should say Joel finally wrote me! But it's always really great to hear from you and it seems like things are going pretty well. I hope you have a great fantabulous week! And Birthday!
Love,
Ian
Man that judgement day thing was publicized really really well. Everyone talked about it this week except mom! At least it didn't actually happen so you can still celebrate your birthday this year... especially since I sent a letter...
I didn't know he was based in Oakland! Haha! That's awesome. There were loads of billboards around advertising the Judgement though. Can't say I was too surprised at the result considering how the Bible says that no one knows or can know... which kind of makes me wonder what Harold Camping is reading... He probably wrote his own book of scripture... I guess this is why we need a restoration of the true church of Jesus Christ. Good thing we had one...
Had a very very excellent week. Probably the best week I have had on my mission so far. At least in terms of lessons taught and finding new investigators and almost every key indicator...except maybe church... I don't even know how it happened but Elder Lee and I just taught so many lessons. Last week we had a total of 8 and this week we had 18. Pretty big increase. I guess I'd have to ascribe it to better planning and more following up. I really believe the Lord is blessing us in this area though. I can truly feel the Spirit working through us as we teach and helping our investigators to progress.
Lately, it has really become apparent to me the importance of commitments like reading the Book of Mormon and praying daily. We visited a less active last night who is the father of a really great member and who's wife is also active. He's also from my hometown Beijing haha so it was fun to talk with him. However, as we began teaching, it quickly became really apparent that he had joined the church for friends and not really for God or out of any actual conversion. Because many of his friends are now less active or have moved away, he's just kind of stopped coming. We invited him to start praying daily and reading the Book of Mormon which he committed to do. I'm confident if he does follow through with it, it will truly increase his faith and cause him to actually become converted. We're gonna follow up with him today and a couple more times this week. It also was kind of a wake-up call to me as to the importance of making sure my investigators really are doing those simple things that will ensure that they develop real faith and experience true conversion because it would appear that that was one point that the missionaries who worked with brother Li overlooked during the teaching process...
We added a whole host of new investigators this week including 2 families, a couple english class students, two high school students who recently immigrated to the States (had a really great lesson with them yesterday), and an older man from Taiwan who's in the states for a year visiting his kids. We also did a lot better finding members to come along to our lessons. Overall, just a very good week.
I think on the whole that being a missionary really has been such a growing experience. I think I really have the confidence to succeed and get things done. Something Elder Lee and I have been working on lately is having more unity in our teaching. In some lessons, our investigator will say a lot of stuff that Elder Lee doesn't really totally understand and so the language barrier is definitely a factor but overall I probably just talk too much. Plus some investigators just really really like to talk and then I feel like I have to step in and take control or the lesson will go who knows where... not where we want it in any case.
We taught this really hilarious guy from PinDong, Taiwan yesterday (which incidentally, was probably both in your's and joels mission dad). He came to church and then we taught him afterwards and he was saying all this stuff like "I think church is too long and you should definitely start off by teaching people the gospel and then have them come to church cause getting them to come to church straight off might just be too much and then they won't understand anything and just be really confused and uninterested... I mean.. for me, I can accept it and I can understand... but this is just a suggestion for other people to try to spread the gospel to..." Of course he was obviously talking about himself but I was like "yeah I totally agree, the only reason we invited you to church right off the bat is because we know that you're a man of deep understanding and that you'd really be able to handle the 3 hour church experience... for other people I definitely agree with your sugestion that we should prep them more (we really should've prepped him better but didn't really have much of a chance...) but for you we knew that you were already advanced enough to be able to handle it..." I basically just had to kind of play off his ego (which is really really big!) the whole lesson so that we could start teaching him... we'll work on humility later haha. Also, everytime we introduced him to another person from Taiwan, he was like "oh you're from the RICH part!!! TAIBEI!!! See!?! I'm not welcome here!!! From poverty-stricken pindong!!!" It was pretty funny. Anyways, we set up another appt. with him for wednesday so it should be alright. Anyways, his daughter owns this frozen yogurt place in chinatown which is where we met him so hopefully we can get some free frozen yogurt out of it... which is the only real reason we're teaching him anyway... Jk!
Anyways, I'd better go write the Joel and Michelle since they both wrote me this week! Well I should say Joel finally wrote me! But it's always really great to hear from you and it seems like things are going pretty well. I hope you have a great fantabulous week! And Birthday!
Love,
Ian
Monday, May 16, 2011
To Be Obedient or Not to Be
That sounds like a pretty fun backpacking trip, Mom! Backpacking is pretty hard... trust me... the merit badge was waaayyy more trouble than it was worth haha. Especially since I already had swimming which fulfilled the requirement.... but it sounds like you had a fairly wild adventure...a couple of bear sightings and perhaps bear attack.... especially since, if that other guy was to be believed, they were "a runnin'" Which sounds pretty menacing to me... Runnin' bears... which sounds like a movie title or something... Haha Mark told me his mom would always go to sleep at like 9 or 9:30 every night and never ever stayed up so I guess 11pm is pretty crazy.
I can't believe anyone would ever run 100 miles voluntarily. I could see like a forced march where you have the Nazis or the Communists at your tail trying to kill you and you must run over the border 100 miles away to safety before they overtake you and ship you off to Auchwitz... that kind of 100 mile run... but it wouldn't surprise me if those people actually PAID to run that kind of a distance. I get tired enough as it is just running 4 miles every other day.... Pretty crazy. I can't imagine having run 50 miles and then have someone say to me "halfway thereeeeee!!!!!" I'd probably punch them.
That sounds pretty cool about the bookmarks. How did they make them? I guess that'd be cool to hear what they came up with to suggest to members since we haven't been very successful getting referrals lately. Although street contacting chinese people is fairly effective anyways and our english class is just getting better and better.
Elder Lee and I had a pretty great week although we were apart for a lot of it since I got invited to the leadership training conference again even though I'm not really much of a leader aside from being senior companion but I'm assuming they're about to make me district leader once Elder Read goes home in a couple of weeks so I'd better start preparing now. It was a really cool conference where we talked about a lot of different things. We had trainings each afternoon (it was 3 days) on receiving revelation through prayer, the book of mormon, and church attendance and why it is important to get our investigators to do all those things. We also talked about other stuff like the gathering of Israel and how to begin teaching and other skills like that.
One thing President Wade said is that last year, North America out-baptized all the international missions combined! Hooray! Also that California did really well despite the fact that baptisms per missionary went down slightly in 12/16 missions, but went up so much in ours and I guess 3 other missions to outweigh all other 12. Pretty cool. Our mission went from 3 baptisms per missionary to 4 in the last year which is pretty huge. Then we talked about why our mission has gotten so much better lately and came up with 4 things: 1 - obedience. Before Pres. Wade got here, our mission was like apostate city since the mission president here never sent anyone home and I guess was kind of a pushover or just let things go... Also San Francisco wasn't much better apparently. Once Pres. Wade got here there was like a civil war in the mission where a whole bunch of missionaries were like resisting becoming obedient but after a while and some sent-home missionaries, obedience finally won out and now our mission is super obedient and awesome. 2 - focus on baptism. 3 - How to begin teaching. Before Pres. Wade got here, they had this thing called BRT which was "Building relationships of trust" which we've seen in the area book sometimes and looks like the biggest waste of time ever where missionaries just go over and try to become their friends before even teaching anything about the gospel. Basically just a stupid practice that was pretty entrenched in the mission but now we've switched to how they do it in Preach My Gospel and setting good expectations and just setting up a different kind of relationship which really is so much better. It explains why so many former investigators have such weird concepts of who we are and what we're doing when we go to teach them. Finally, number 4 was a focus on the Doctrine of Christ... which only really happened rather recently with the last leadership training but is pretty cool. Anyways, pretty good conference.
We had 3 investigators come to church this week and they all really loved it! We had Sister Meng who is already like the most golden investigator ever and super stable. Also Sister Luo, a 70+ woman from JiangXi, which was her frist time at church. I contacted her last sunday in Chinatown and she was like "I've been to so many different churches already and just can't find one that I think is true." I was like "I think this person is very likely prepared to hear what we have to say" haha. She seems super golden as well and reallly really loved church and even stayed for the baptism afterwards. Finally there was... BRENDA Li.... Although she's not that much like you, she has 2 crazy and very full of energy sons who were rather wild during sacrament meeting but really really liked primary so it's very likely that she will come back which is great. Elder Lee and I were just praying the whole time that she would have a good experience at church and it really paid off. The Lord really does answer prayers.
Thanks for your emails this week mom and dad! I hope you have a great week!
Love you!
-Ian
I can't believe anyone would ever run 100 miles voluntarily. I could see like a forced march where you have the Nazis or the Communists at your tail trying to kill you and you must run over the border 100 miles away to safety before they overtake you and ship you off to Auchwitz... that kind of 100 mile run... but it wouldn't surprise me if those people actually PAID to run that kind of a distance. I get tired enough as it is just running 4 miles every other day.... Pretty crazy. I can't imagine having run 50 miles and then have someone say to me "halfway thereeeeee!!!!!" I'd probably punch them.
That sounds pretty cool about the bookmarks. How did they make them? I guess that'd be cool to hear what they came up with to suggest to members since we haven't been very successful getting referrals lately. Although street contacting chinese people is fairly effective anyways and our english class is just getting better and better.
Elder Lee and I had a pretty great week although we were apart for a lot of it since I got invited to the leadership training conference again even though I'm not really much of a leader aside from being senior companion but I'm assuming they're about to make me district leader once Elder Read goes home in a couple of weeks so I'd better start preparing now. It was a really cool conference where we talked about a lot of different things. We had trainings each afternoon (it was 3 days) on receiving revelation through prayer, the book of mormon, and church attendance and why it is important to get our investigators to do all those things. We also talked about other stuff like the gathering of Israel and how to begin teaching and other skills like that.
One thing President Wade said is that last year, North America out-baptized all the international missions combined! Hooray! Also that California did really well despite the fact that baptisms per missionary went down slightly in 12/16 missions, but went up so much in ours and I guess 3 other missions to outweigh all other 12. Pretty cool. Our mission went from 3 baptisms per missionary to 4 in the last year which is pretty huge. Then we talked about why our mission has gotten so much better lately and came up with 4 things: 1 - obedience. Before Pres. Wade got here, our mission was like apostate city since the mission president here never sent anyone home and I guess was kind of a pushover or just let things go... Also San Francisco wasn't much better apparently. Once Pres. Wade got here there was like a civil war in the mission where a whole bunch of missionaries were like resisting becoming obedient but after a while and some sent-home missionaries, obedience finally won out and now our mission is super obedient and awesome. 2 - focus on baptism. 3 - How to begin teaching. Before Pres. Wade got here, they had this thing called BRT which was "Building relationships of trust" which we've seen in the area book sometimes and looks like the biggest waste of time ever where missionaries just go over and try to become their friends before even teaching anything about the gospel. Basically just a stupid practice that was pretty entrenched in the mission but now we've switched to how they do it in Preach My Gospel and setting good expectations and just setting up a different kind of relationship which really is so much better. It explains why so many former investigators have such weird concepts of who we are and what we're doing when we go to teach them. Finally, number 4 was a focus on the Doctrine of Christ... which only really happened rather recently with the last leadership training but is pretty cool. Anyways, pretty good conference.
We had 3 investigators come to church this week and they all really loved it! We had Sister Meng who is already like the most golden investigator ever and super stable. Also Sister Luo, a 70+ woman from JiangXi, which was her frist time at church. I contacted her last sunday in Chinatown and she was like "I've been to so many different churches already and just can't find one that I think is true." I was like "I think this person is very likely prepared to hear what we have to say" haha. She seems super golden as well and reallly really loved church and even stayed for the baptism afterwards. Finally there was... BRENDA Li.... Although she's not that much like you, she has 2 crazy and very full of energy sons who were rather wild during sacrament meeting but really really liked primary so it's very likely that she will come back which is great. Elder Lee and I were just praying the whole time that she would have a good experience at church and it really paid off. The Lord really does answer prayers.
Thanks for your emails this week mom and dad! I hope you have a great week!
Love you!
-Ian
Monday, May 9, 2011
Mother's Day
Herrow!
Glad to hear you got my awesome heart-card. It took me about 6 hours to get that drawing done... but I think it was worth it. Good to talk to you guys this week. Although it made me feel kind of trunky. Like makes me think about what's going to happen when I get home... which is weird... and best not to think about. But I guess you'd better start arranging people for me to marry since I expect to be married at most 6 weeks after I get home. Haha Elder Lee was telling me about how the only thing his mom talked to him about was how she's making all kinds of plans for him to marry his girlfriend when he gets home. He was like "mom why are you talking about this to me now?" haha. Pretty funny.
Good to hear you had the Johnsons come over to be your proxy children for mother's day. How old is Eric and Will now? Is Eric in high school already? Pretty wild. But I guess it's been like 3 or 4 years since we lived there last. We were listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir last night and listened to that one song that took the lyrics from John 3:16-17 which always makes me think about how we sang that in the choir in the Arlington ward which was pretty epic. Pretty great choir.
Which reminds me of yesterday when we sang one of those mother's day songs out of the children's hymn book with the elder's quorum. And the elder's quorum president president was like really hilariously professional about it. First of all he got bright red bowties for everyone which was hilarious cause it was like the cheesiest thing in the world but Elder Lee and I were talking about it and decided that they didn't see it as cheesy or weren't doing it to be funny. But we thought it was pretty hilarious. And then Felix's (the elder's quorum president) bowtie was different than everyone else's since it was white and he was conducting us like we were some kind of professional choir. So funny since we were not only an unprofessional elder's quorum, but an unprofessional chinese elder's quorum at that haha. It was pretty funny though. Such a weird program for mother's day... people just like went up and talked about their mothers and then one guy went up and read some random poem about mothers while another brother was playing this random song on the piano as background music. It was pretty weird. But I think our investigator Sister Meng was a fan. Especially of all the men in the branch and how they were all praising mothers and stuff. Her husband and 8 year old son are coming to the States in June or July which is pretty awesome. So lots of potential there.
That's cool that dad's chinese teacher finally made it to the states. Although to be honest, Falongdafa people are weeeirrrrdddd hahahaha. I ran into this Falonggong lady in San Francisco twice and she was talking our heads off about how awesome falonggong is for like 30 minutes each time. Finally, we ran into her AGAIN right by our apartment here in Oakland where she apparently lives which was hilarious and she talked to us for like an hour about how falonggong is the best and we should convert. Anyways, she ended up talking about how aliens gave us technology to harm us and how we shouldn't eat any genetically modified food because it will make our kids deformed. It was really really hilarious. But on the upside, she seemed like a nice person and is really committed to her faith, which I think counts for something since if all of our members were as active in spreading the gospel as she is in spreading falonggong, I think missionary work could really be going places. I really think the church has a lot of untapped potential in the members. I feel like the missionary program could be so much better if we could just get the members on board.
I'd better write my president's letter now... but I can probably call you on skype next time if you like. Since it seems like everyone else was using it. Well not everyone else... but some people.
Love you guys!
-Ian
Glad to hear you got my awesome heart-card. It took me about 6 hours to get that drawing done... but I think it was worth it. Good to talk to you guys this week. Although it made me feel kind of trunky. Like makes me think about what's going to happen when I get home... which is weird... and best not to think about. But I guess you'd better start arranging people for me to marry since I expect to be married at most 6 weeks after I get home. Haha Elder Lee was telling me about how the only thing his mom talked to him about was how she's making all kinds of plans for him to marry his girlfriend when he gets home. He was like "mom why are you talking about this to me now?" haha. Pretty funny.
Good to hear you had the Johnsons come over to be your proxy children for mother's day. How old is Eric and Will now? Is Eric in high school already? Pretty wild. But I guess it's been like 3 or 4 years since we lived there last. We were listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir last night and listened to that one song that took the lyrics from John 3:16-17 which always makes me think about how we sang that in the choir in the Arlington ward which was pretty epic. Pretty great choir.
Which reminds me of yesterday when we sang one of those mother's day songs out of the children's hymn book with the elder's quorum. And the elder's quorum president president was like really hilariously professional about it. First of all he got bright red bowties for everyone which was hilarious cause it was like the cheesiest thing in the world but Elder Lee and I were talking about it and decided that they didn't see it as cheesy or weren't doing it to be funny. But we thought it was pretty hilarious. And then Felix's (the elder's quorum president) bowtie was different than everyone else's since it was white and he was conducting us like we were some kind of professional choir. So funny since we were not only an unprofessional elder's quorum, but an unprofessional chinese elder's quorum at that haha. It was pretty funny though. Such a weird program for mother's day... people just like went up and talked about their mothers and then one guy went up and read some random poem about mothers while another brother was playing this random song on the piano as background music. It was pretty weird. But I think our investigator Sister Meng was a fan. Especially of all the men in the branch and how they were all praising mothers and stuff. Her husband and 8 year old son are coming to the States in June or July which is pretty awesome. So lots of potential there.
That's cool that dad's chinese teacher finally made it to the states. Although to be honest, Falongdafa people are weeeirrrrdddd hahahaha. I ran into this Falonggong lady in San Francisco twice and she was talking our heads off about how awesome falonggong is for like 30 minutes each time. Finally, we ran into her AGAIN right by our apartment here in Oakland where she apparently lives which was hilarious and she talked to us for like an hour about how falonggong is the best and we should convert. Anyways, she ended up talking about how aliens gave us technology to harm us and how we shouldn't eat any genetically modified food because it will make our kids deformed. It was really really hilarious. But on the upside, she seemed like a nice person and is really committed to her faith, which I think counts for something since if all of our members were as active in spreading the gospel as she is in spreading falonggong, I think missionary work could really be going places. I really think the church has a lot of untapped potential in the members. I feel like the missionary program could be so much better if we could just get the members on board.
I'd better write my president's letter now... but I can probably call you on skype next time if you like. Since it seems like everyone else was using it. Well not everyone else... but some people.
Love you guys!
-Ian
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