Hai!
I'm writing today on a really massive 27-inch iMac in the apple store. Despite the fact this screen is bigger than big the font is still really really small and hard to read. Kind of ironic.
Had a pretty good week here. Our Sacrament Meeting attendance wasn't as good as last week but still remained pretty high. We had about 22 attendees and 8 investigators which is pretty good and just enough to keep the feeling of excitement and growth so vital to our small group. Everyone stayed after for literally an hour and a half and just chatted and bonded with one another. It was pretty awesome. We had all of our recent converts there except for JianHua who was baptized in October and is going through a rather rebellious stage, but his brother was there and all his friends who he is trying valiantly to convince not to come hahaha. His mom (also our investigator and a regular at church) said he doesn't really know what to do now cause he's like trying to convince everyone not to come to church and say it's bad and everything but it's totally not working and now he just feels left out because he's the only one not coming hahaha. We had 6 high school guys there, 3 of whom are recent converts, 2 of which have a baptismal date, and 1 who we just need to start teaching. Pretty sweet. I don't really get it though... We've taught like 3 girls at their school and they have like no spirituality and no desire but all the guys we teach are like "I want to be baptized now!" And then come to church regularly. It's pretty sweet but way the opposite from what it usually is since i always thought sisters had more spirituality than brothers. Anyways, we're hoping to get a temple trip organized to take all these recent converts to do baptisms but we're already so busy teaching investigators that it's tough to find time to focus on them as well.
We had a pretty cool experience on Saturday afternoon teaching one of our investigators scheduled to be baptized this coming Sunday. She was being all hesitant about her baptism saying she wanted to change to March etc etc and so finally I was like "alright let's kneel and pray and see what Heavenly Father thinks." Now this is generally an "all or nothing" approach to resolving an investigators concern and in my experience only really works like 70% of the time since a lot of the time they can't really recognize the influence of the Holy Ghost or what it's telling them. So anyways, we kneel and set the expectation that we'll wait and listen for about a minute after she finishes. So after she finishes praying she goes "I think He's telling me I'm OK".... I'm like... uh oh what does that mean?... "I feel like I need to get baptized on the 26th and stop worrying about everything else since it'll all work itself out." Elder Brown and I were like "YEP!" Haha. Really a pretty miraculous answer to prayer. I feel like prayer kind of works like that though. Sometimes it really yields great results and other times it just does not get answered like you want it to. Kind of like how I was praying that the Huang sisters would be able to make it to church this Sunday and then they didn't... Argh!!! It was pretty lame too because we went to the Oakland Temple Visitor's Center on Wednesday and had a really great spiritual experience and set a baptismal date with them for March 3rd which they'll not be able to now meet because they can't come to church 3 times. Really frustrating. Sometimes this Chinese sense of intense filial piety is really really annoying. And their mom's not even like that strongly opposed to them coming to church they're just afraid that she'll be mad they can't be with her on her only day off. Which I suppose I can understand but we've stressed the importance of church with them so many times you'd think they'd have strong enough faith by now to make it there regularly or bring their mom and help her to at least come to an understanding that no, we're not a cult and church isn't a place where we just do nothing and sing songs or something.
Anyways, things are going pretty well. I'm really enjoying serving in downtown San Francisco. I guess I've been in this area for about a year now... man. But honestly I feel like my vision for missionary work has been so drastically changed in the time that I have spent here. I could not even imagine baptizing like 2 or 3 people in one month last time I was serving here and now it's pretty lame if we don't. We have Zhang SiShun pretty solid for next weekend and we're gonna be doing our darndest to get Xia Fan on board since she's already gotten her answer from God. Hopefully she'll have the courage to act on it.
In any case, that cracks me up that Seth was living like that. How stingy can you be? And is that 60 american dollars?! If so then that's a huge ripoff! hahaha!
Pretty impressive about the running madness you two are engaged in. Yeah I don't doubt I could probably run about 10 miles without too much difficulty at this point as long as I kept a steady pace. Elder Brown is running me rather ragged and since it hasn't killed me yet, I think I've become rather stronger as a result. Unfortunately, his application to BYU just got denied which is a huge bummer for him... but I think there are some backups in place so it'll probably turn out alright.
In any case, with regards to my release date, it's technically Sept. 5... but I'm sure I'll have to be leaving a little bit early to make it back in time for school and stuff so I'll talk to President Wade maybe and then get back to you. And can't I sign up for classes in March? I thought that's what you said...
Anyways, Love you guys! Have a great week!
-Ian
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