Countdown

Wah.  Sounds busy there.  President Wade is getting ready to head out too... moving  is always a hassle.  President Wade is having a series of zone meetings with each zone before he heads out this week and then we'll have a meeting with the new mission president on Friday.  I still have absolutely no idea who President Meredith is or what kinds of things he's done in the past... they said we were all gonna get something that said something about it but we still haven't.  Oh well I'm sure I'll know soon enough.

Yeah I'm steeling myself for really hot and humid weather.  I might die from the shock though just because of how nice the weather is here.  It's been really really nice this week too.  Not too hot, not to cool, nice breeze, pretty clouds.  Man. Can't really get much better than this.

So I'm still here in San Francisco emailing at the apple store.  Elder Liu and I will probably eat lunch here and then head back to Oakland on BART since we didn't feel like driving in today.

Congratulations on your wedding anniversary!  I don't know if it's particular to Chinese people in the bay area but I feel like almost every family here is really scattered and full of all kinds of problems.  Or maybe just the people willing to listen to me.  I feel like complete families are hard to come by or are never ever interested in listening to us for some reason.  I can probably count on one hand the number of times I was able to meet with complete families.  We visited this lady the other day who's kind of an investigator but not really that interested.  She was showing me her English notebook which had an example sentence of "marriage is the grave of love".  I was like "wow that's a horrible example sentence"  She was like "What? It's true!" haha.  So horribly wrong and stupid.  It was this really propaganda-esque English notebook printed in China.  Quite an interesting read.

What exactly do they train you on for going to be a DCM?  Just do whatever the ambassador says and give him all the credit for everything good you do.  And also take the blame for anything bad.  Sounds pretty simple to me...

In any case, we had a pretty good week.  Fiona's still being hesitant for some reason.  She just feels she needs more time or something.  Anyways we'll go visit her tomorrow night and hopefully get it sorted out.  She didn't even come to church on Sunday even though he r uncle came.  Her uncle is from GuiYang and really really humble and likes church.  He's preparing to be baptized in July so hopefully he doesn't find a job that requires him to work on Sundays since he usually does restaurant stuff but is out of work atm.  So we called Fiona last night and talked to her for like 30 minutes.  Apparently she was out interviewing for a job yesterday morning and told her uncle she was sick since he was sacrificing his looking for work time to go to church.  So she NOT ONLY didn't keep the sabbath day holy but ALSO lied to her uncle about it.  Aiya.  We told her to repent basically. She was like "oh yeah I didn't think about it like that dang it!"  So ridiculous.

Brother Xing is doing well.  He's getting to know a lot of the other guys his age in the branch and even came to Gao Yuan's birthday party on Saturday since we got him invited.  It started a little after 5 and apparently he didn't go home till like midnight haha.  They all made it to church on time the next day though so... pretty sweet.  He also bought a new car last week so we can probably get more people to church from DVC if we need to.  All we need to do is find more investigators there and we'll be good... 

We have a lot of investigators right now but we just need to be more bold in inviting them to be baptized even though many of them have already expressed reluctance to us.  So we'll hopefully be able to help them resolve their concerns and develop greater faith and what not.

Anyways, I guess that's about it for this week.  I really like this area it's pretty fun.  We're working a lot more in central Oakland lately with the English Class and doing a lot of finding there.  It seems to be going pretty well.  For some reason we're getting a ton of new students lately and a lot of them are pretty promising.

Thanks for all your love and support.  Hope everything goes well for your move!  Love you!

-Ian

Cold

Herrow!  Happy Father's Day!...Yesterday!  Yeah I was gonna call you guys anyway but I don't actually remember your number.  Or my old number I should say.  That sounds like a pretty fun trip Joel's on right now. I want to go!  So unfair!  Can't believe he didn't even invite me...

 

So I have a pretty bad cold today.  Woke up yesterday with a scratchy throat since we opened the window to sleep (which we do almost every night but it must have been blowing in a particularly vibrant brand of virus that night) and it's just been getting worse.  Last night was pretty longggggggg... kept having to get up to blow my nose and my throat felt like it was on fire.  I said a prayer to ask for some kind of cough medicine and then found some literally 5 seconds later haha. Not sure how much it helped but it had at least a placebo effect.  I don't really know about all these Chinese remedies for curing colds though.  Is it true you can just sweat it out?  Anyways, we ran lake merrit around noon and it did seem to help.  Still.  I' haven't gotten sick in a while and it's really not my cup of tea.  Quite inconvenient expect for if you're like 7 and going to elementary school in which case it's actually kind of nice in a way...

 

So Fiona came up with some random concerns that we don't really understand too well.  She actually passed her baptismal interview which we told her means that she's ready to be baptized but she said she doesn't feel ready.  Not sure why.  She might just think it's too fast or something.  She was saying ridiculous things like "I want to read the whole Book of Mormon before I get baptized" and "there are still some imperfect things about myself I feel like I need to change first"... anyways, so she wasn't baptized this weekend.  However, Brother Xing's baptism went really well.  He's super funny but shared a really great testimony at his baptismal service.  He's got a pretty solid testimony and he's just a really cool guy.  The baptismal service went really well too.  Unfortunately Fiona left church early for some reason and so she missed it even though she said she wanted to come.  Very lame of her.

 

We added 11 new investigators this week which was pretty cool.  Two of them are sisters from HaiNan and are preparing to be baptized next month.  The younger sister, Wang Li, is 22 and is a "Christian" although she doesn't know much about Christianity and hasn't been baptized.  The older sister, Wang Yan, is 25 and doesn't really have any set of beliefs but seems really interested in obtaining one.  They've been in the states for 20 something days.  Pretty prepared.  I think they quite enjoyed church yesterday so hopefully they won't get scared off by the inevitable accusation that we're a cult.  Something I've come to realize about that though is that if they know you pretty well and like you as a missionary, other people calling us a cult won't scare them off right away.  They'll at least come for an explanation generally and give you a chance to explain the situation.  I've definitely learned a lot about developing the right kind of relationship with investigators.  I definitely want to stay in contact with all the people I've been able to teach and baptize here in the bay area.  I think a lot of missionaries just kind of cut off all contact or find it hard to get in contact just because of where they served but I'm pretty sure most of my recent converts have facebook... so... it should be pretty easy.

 

That's great we'll be able to come back for a couple days in August.  That's like right after I'll have left haha.  Leave for a week and then suddenly show up again ha.  It's too bad we wouldn't be able to come on a Sunday so we could go to church in Chinatown but oh well... that's ok.

 

Yeah I'm not sure how much an xbox would be worth these days but I suspect not a lot.  I don't really expect to play any video games when I get back but maybe I can give it to someone...

 

Anyways, I'm really enjoying being here in Oakland.  Apart from being sick.  Oakland honestly has absoutely the best weather of any place I have ever been.  And I think that even includes South Africa... mainly cause I can't remember how nice the weather was there.  But seriously.  Oakland.  Too bad the quality of the people here isn't quite up to standards.  Rather rude of them to "occupy" the area and make it not as nice as it should be.  San Francisco is too cold and north, south, and west all get too hot.  Berkeley's not bad... but it's full of liberals so...

 

In any case, thanks for all your love and support!  I love you!  Have a great week!

 

-Ian