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
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