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
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