YMCA!

Hai

Too bad about the pictures. I was hoping to see some sweet cherry blossom adventure. However, the cherry blossom festival in Japantown is coming up so we'll see if we can't schedule some tracting or something over there during the festival and then happen upon the festivities. I wasn't in SF last year when it was going on.

That's kind of funny about your office burning down dad haha. I think most of the time those ceiling sprinklers end up causing more damage than the actual fire. Kind of like my year at BYU where we had approximately no fires but I think 3 or 4 random sprinkler attacks where entire floors were flooded and all heck broke loose. Including on my floor... fortunately only on the half I wasn't a part of. Those sprinklers are super powerful though.

So things are going pretty well here. We had 2 baptized last week but only 1 confirmed this weekend which was a first for me... Steven Chen failed to show up at his own confirmation. We were thinking about doing a proxy confirmation but then realized you can only do them for the permanently absent. In any case, we still haven't managed to get ahold of him to figure out what happened. Although he really wasn't the only one since we had like 32 people (investigators, members, recent converts and the like) who committed to come to church and then had an actual of 16 who came. It wasn't even raining! Which was probably working against us since one of our investigators had some workers over to her house to fix something who wouldn't have come if it rained she said. Basically kind of a bust. not a total failure mind you but it could have gone better. In any case, we went over to the YMCA this week which is across the street from our English Class here in Chinatown and held a basketball activity for the young ppl in our small group. It went pretty well and we discovered that there are a whole host of other young Chinatown people who go there that we were able to meet. Basically we're thinking of getting a YMCA membership and then playing basketball there everyday instead of street contacting. I think my perception of missionary work has changed a ton in the past little while. We do as little street contacting as possible just because of how much more effectively we can use our time doing other things like setting up lessons with people, participating in random activities in Chinatown and doing stuff like that. I sometimes feel like it would actually be easier to be a good missionary in everyday life as a normal person if that's what I was really focused on all of the time. I can just imagine how many of my classmates I could get to come to church if I went to school at one of these high schools.

We have a bunch of really great investigators right now even though a bunch of them didn't show to church this week for some reason. We have about 4 people scheduled to be baptized on Easter and 1 for April Fool's Day haha between sessions of general conference. We met with Alice's mom yesterday for the first time in a while (the one half paralyzed since December) and convinced her that she needs to be baptized on Easter. So we're gonna be working hard to make that happen. She basically only has to come to church every week till then and she'll be fine. I feel like most people who are ready to be baptized are basically already living most of the commandments and just need to develop faith and commit. Especially these young people. As long as they have desire and a basic understanding, they can join the church and then learn more. At least that's the philosophy we're going with for the time being.

Anyways, thanks for your emails this week. Love you!

-Ian