Something Old, Something New

Oct. 3, 2011

Hey parentals!

Croatia sounds like a blast. I know all about Diocletian from that Byzantine History class Joel and I took. Pretty cool pretty cool. That sounds like a really annoying keyboard. I remember using crappy ones like that back in China.

Well, it's been a pretty great transfer with Elder Lin. Seems like he just got here and he's now packing out again. However, I'm really excited to be able to serve a new/old companion: Elder Lee! I feel very excited to be working in the Chinese group here just because of all the potential there is for improvement here. We had a pretty good week last week. Unfortunately we were not able to find any new investigators which is a first for the time I've been here in Union City and is not good at all, but we will definitely make that more of a focus in the coming weeks so we can continue to build up our teaching pool.

Our 3 investigators with a baptismal date are looking very solid. 2 of them came to General Conference and the other one really wanted to come but got called into work so wasn't able to make it. We did meet with him last night however and he's excited to watch the conference online perhaps on Tuesday. We actually had a rather upsetting but, in retrospect, slightly amusing experience last night with said investigator brother Zhao. We taught him the Law of the Sabbath and we had invited a member along who had brought along her other member friend. Anyways, as we asked them to share their experiences keeping the Sabbath day holy, it kind of ended up turning into them sharing their experiences violating this commandment and talking about how it was more of a "try to keep it as best you can but if you can't then God will understand" kind of recommendation... It was pretty bad. We did our best to salvage the lesson but may need to reteach that commandment... Turns out it really is important to prepare members to accompany lessons... However not as bad as one time I guess Joel had a member who was like drinking beer or something during a teaching appointment and wouldn't throw it away haha. So I guess it could be worse.

General Conference is over... once again. It always seems to go by so quickly. It was very good this time though. The only drawback was that I had to watch 3/5 sessions in Chinese because our investigators came and we needed to sit with them... but it's still true in Chinese... And the translators seem to be getting better. Last time they had like no expression but this time seemed to be more emotional. It was kind of funny actually I think there was one point where one of the female translators was kind of choking up and the speaker wasn't at all haha.

I'm kind of warming up to the idea that you're going to be in Taiwan when I get back. That's pretty cool. Even though they have a girly Taiwanese accent. As opposed to my MANLY Northeastern Chinese person accent. Seriously, everyone I talk to is like "How do you have a dongbei accent?..." I'm like... "well... it's like this..." And talk about how I was born and raised in ShenYang... just kidding. But I don't think it's THAT obvious. However everyone else seems to think I speak Chinese exactly like a Dongbei Chinese person. Which, admittedly is better than a white American person. Plus, they speak pretty biaozhun Chinese anyways so... take that!

So I don't have that much more to write now but still have quite a bit of time since Michelle and Joel didn't write me and this is the only email I got... but that's ok, I'll just go look up some of the conference talks in English and see if they were any different than the meaning I got out of them in Chinese haha.

Love you! Have a wonderful bunderful time in Croatia! I wish I could go...

-Ian