Transfer Time!

April 16, 2012

In answer to your question to when I'll get transferred, I've been transferred already!  To Oakland again!  I feel like I'm just doing a big circuit of the bay area haha.  It's kind of a bummer to be leaving Chinatown but I'm excited for the new area.  My companion is Elder Liu from Taiwan who's a really great missionary and likes to use a bunch of Chinese idioms when he talks which is a good learning opportunity for me haha.  The work here has been going pretty slow though lately.  We've only got 1 investigator basically who is preparing to be baptized on the 28th.  But I have a lot of faith that we can find and baptize a whole bunch more.  Also, the weather here is wayyyy nicer.  I don't need to wear a jacket and sweaters all the time anymore!!! We're actually in the Oakland North area which is really huge.  We cover Berkeley, Hercules, Richmond, Concord... basically a third of the mission.  It seems like the branch here is pretty weak.  I hope we can help strengthen it here.

We took a picture of my last Sunday in Chinatown.  It was pretty epic.  We had a whole bunch of people come to church.  Pretty cool cause most of them are people that we baptized there and the rest were basically investigators we had found. I'll bring it back with me since I'll likely be too lazy to print it out and mail it over at this point haha.  Elder Brown and I did a lot of finding this week since we didn't have a whole lot of investigators as most of them were baptized last week.  We passed out like a billion English class flyers and had a whole bunch of new people show up to English class on Saturday and then church on Sunday. 

That is a pretty sweet article.  It really does pretty much get the gist of missionary work.  The play is coming to San Francisco in November I think... maybe we can find some time to come back and see it!!!  Although I don't know that we'll be able to get tickets.  Aunt Annette was lobbying to have us come back to the bay area on our way to Taiwan and hang out for a day or two.  Might be a pretty good idea actually.  I'm really excited to go to Taiwan actually!  Elder Liu's from TaiZhong.  I asked him if he knew Joel and showed him a picture.  He didn't... But that's ok.

In any case, that's awesome news about Jordan's mission call.  I just looked at he mission boundary map on lds.org and it seems like it's right smack dab in the middle of the state.  That'll be pretty sweet for her. 

Thanks for the package of nuts and stuff mom!  It was and is perfect!  Ever since being companions with Elder Brown, I haven't really eaten too much or possibly any junk food or candy.  It's definitely made a difference.  My pants feel a lot looser than they used to.  I've definitely gotten a ton better at running as well.  I used to run like 2 miles and be beat but now I can run like 4 and still have energy to keep going.  I think it's hard to tell as companions with Elder Brown though since he's so fast and I don't ever seem to be able to close the gap.

Anyhow, I guess that's about it this week.  I'm sure I'll have many exciting adventures about Oakland next week.  We cover west Oakland in the new area which is the most "luan" part... although I'm not sure how many Chinese people there are that would dare live there.  Generally they stay away from places populated with those of african descent.

Love you guys!  Thanks for all your love and support!

-Ian

No Rain on Our Parade (or BBQ)

Herroww!!!

Yeah conference was pretty good although we had a ridiculously busy weekend. We decided to host a barbecue on Saturday afternoon between sessions from like 3-5 at the chapel up here in downtown. So we invited a lot of people and it rained that morning. We were like "dang it... Chinese people hate the rain..." However, miraculously, it cleared up about an hour or 2 before our event was to begin and was bright and sunny the whole time and then it started raining again about an hour or 2 after we finished. Pretty SWEET.... MOM.... Aiya. I can't stop using that expression in my writing for some reason. I'm going to go back to college and sprinkle it throughout all my essays haha. Anyhow, we had a very successful BBQ. We expected maybe like 20 or 30 people but we ended up with 40!!! All these high schoolers brought their friends and we met a ton of new potential investigators. Elder Brown and I got this really ghetto grill from the sunset chapel and brought it over in our car. Unfortunately the top grill was missing so we grabbed some oven racks and bbq'd on them. Very successful activity.

Then we had Annie Liang's baptism yesterday between the morning and afternoon sessions and we were running around getting the program done and making sure there was going to be water in the font and so on and so forth so we missed part of the first session and then couldn't really focus too well on the whole thing since we had a ton of stuff going on. Quite crazy. It went really well however. She bore her testimony at the end and talked about how her mom had expressly told her when they got to the States that she could participate in church but could never get baptized so when we gave her the baptismal record to be signed by her mom she was really nervous and prayed a lot that her mom would let her be baptized. So when she finally asked her mom, her mom was like "umm... ok. For you I think it'd be alright". Annie said her mom could see the change that had occurred in her in the past few weeks and therefore agreed to her joining the church. It was a really great testimony.

We have 4 investigators lined up to be baptized on Sunday and hopefully everything will go smoothly. Elder Brown and I will likely have to baptize Alice's mom together since she's half-paralyzed but she's definitely willing and ready to go. We also have Duona, Vincent, and Sister Shen who are lined up and seem pretty ready to go. They all made it to sessions of conference at one point or another (we borrowed a projector from the branch president and broadcasted a session after English class here in Chinatown) and so they seem to still be doing pretty well. It's kind of hard to describe any of these people in intricate detail because of how many people we're teaching at the moment. We found loads of referrals this last week and will hopefully get even more in the coming weeks. President Pearce (the branch president) said success is like mcDonalds french fries. You can eat them when they're hot but you can't let 'em cool down haha. I'd say he's about right.

Anyways, so you finally got your long-coveted macbook pro. Sounds fancy! In fact I'm currently typing on a macbook pro as well. Apple is taking over the world!!! The Dell's not such a dinosaur! Unless you made it one!!! It just looks like one compared to mac, which puts everything in a shiny case and then makes it cost a lot more money. Which seems to work pretty well for them...

That's interesting that missionaries there are counting the number of Book of Mormons they have handed out. We don't really use that to indicate anything. Although the play 'The Book of Mormon" is coming to San Francisco so now there are pictures of a dancing missionary on all the busses... can't remember if I told you about that already. But in any case, it's kind of funny.

Yeah President Wade pretty much gave us a no-go for the whole YMCA thing. Which is a bummer cause I'm sure we could make it work. Oh well... I guess he's the inspired one and stuff so I'm sure he knows what he's doing. Sometimes I think we could do more here even as some kind of youth leaders rather than a missionary though haha.

Yeah I agree about Romney being President. You really can't please very many people as President of this country. I feel like everyone expects everything when there's only so much one person can do. Sounds like Obama's health care gig has been kind of a headache from start to finish... I'd comment more but I don't really understand very much about it. Not sure why that should keep me from voicing a firm opinion since it doesn't seem to hinder the rest of the American population but... I guess I'm not supposed to talk about that kind of stuff anyway.

So.. I guess that's it for this week. Thanks for your emails and support! Love you!

-Ian

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

The Field is White

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

There is Sunshine in my Soul

This week was sooo much better! We had like 33 people come to church 12 of whom were investigators and probably like 4 or 5 were nonmembers from english class or just people we invited on the street. It was pretty sweet. We called a ton of people on Saturday and got commitments out of a lot so we were really excited to have a good attendance this week and it went really well. We also moved Sacrament Meeting to the beginning and had a bit of a shorter gospel principles lesson afterwards making the whole meeting a tiny bit over an hour which worked out perfectly. Then afterwards we had a potluck activity which we have once a month (will probably change it to twice a month if at all possible) which was a huge success cause it basically provided a great opportunity for everyone to get to know eacthother and socialize etc. It was a great experience over all. When you have a church meeting like that, it's really easy to keep people coming because they want to be there because of what a positive experience it is. I really enjoyed it anyway. I think I've finally caught the vision of what potential we have here in this area and what to do to keep it up.

Even the Huang sisters showed up! They said their mom got sick so they could do whatever they wanted that day and Elder Brown was like "finally she's being punished!!!" Hahaha. They laughed really hard at that since they knew he was joking (hopefully...) ha. It's not really their mom's decision though ultimately since they are both over 20 and can totally do whatever they want anyway. However they had a great experience yesterday and so we hope they'll continue coming.

In other news, that's cool that John is coming out to visit you. I vaguely remember what he looks like and stuff so that's good. A tour of the state department?... wat? Why? There's like nothing interesting there. Just ask dad! Haha. Pretty lame.

My back feels alright now. I just kind of had a weird knot in it last week or something. In any case, yeah, Elder Brown likes to exercise so I've been doing more exercise than I think I ever have in my life. It's definitely having an effect although I still really don't like to wake up in the morning so I don't know how effective I'll be at keeping it up once we're seperated. But we'll see. Sometimes I have more self discipline than I give myself credit for.

Anyways, you might be able to find me walking around Chinatown this time dad. We spend more time there than I did last time I was in this area. Also I'm thinking I may not want to take that random bioethics course in the fall so I just changed my schedule a little. Mostly cause I think possibly 15 credits would be enough to keep me busy.

In any case, I guess that's all I have to talk about this week. Thanks for your letters and stuff. And also the magnets... even though I thought it was the ipod shuffle... but that's ok! Magnets are great too! Happy Valentine's Day!

Love you!

-Ian

There is Sunshine in my Soul

This week was sooo much better! We had like 33 people come to church 12 of whom were investigators and probably like 4 or 5 were nonmembers from english class or just people we invited on the street. It was pretty sweet. We called a ton of people on Saturday and got commitments out of a lot so we were really excited to have a good attendance this week and it went really well. We also moved Sacrament Meeting to the beginning and had a bit of a shorter gospel principles lesson afterwards making the whole meeting a tiny bit over an hour which worked out perfectly. Then afterwards we had a potluck activity which we have once a month (will probably change it to twice a month if at all possible) which was a huge success cause it basically provided a great opportunity for everyone to get to know eacthother and socialize etc. It was a great experience over all. When you have a church meeting like that, it's really easy to keep people coming because they want to be there because of what a positive experience it is. I really enjoyed it anyway. I think I've finally caught the vision of what potential we have here in this area and what to do to keep it up.

Even the Huang sisters showed up! They said their mom got sick so they could do whatever they wanted that day and Elder Brown was like "finally she's being punished!!!" Hahaha. They laughed really hard at that since they knew he was joking (hopefully...) ha. It's not really their mom's decision though ultimately since they are both over 20 and can totally do whatever they want anyway. However they had a great experience yesterday and so we hope they'll continue coming.

In other news, that's cool that John is coming out to visit you. I vaguely remember what he looks like and stuff so that's good. A tour of the state department?... wat? Why? There's like nothing interesting there. Just ask dad! Haha. Pretty lame.

My back feels alright now. I just kind of had a weird knot in it last week or something. In any case, yeah, Elder Brown likes to exercise so I've been doing more exercise than I think I ever have in my life. It's definitely having an effect although I still really don't like to wake up in the morning so I don't know how effective I'll be at keeping it up once we're seperated. But we'll see. Sometimes I have more self discipline than I give myself credit for.

Anyways, you might be able to find me walking around Chinatown this time dad. We spend more time there than I did last time I was in this area. Also I'm thinking I may not want to take that random bioethics course in the fall so I just changed my schedule a little. Mostly cause I think possibly 15 credits would be enough to keep me busy.

In any case, I guess that's all I have to talk about this week. Thanks for your letters and stuff. And also the magnets... even though I thought it was the ipod shuffle... but that's ok! Magnets are great too! Happy Valentine's Day!

Love you!

-Ian

The Straight and Narrow Path

Hellow!

We had a pretty good week. We had a goal initially of having 3 people baptized this weekend and ended up with one, which in and of itself was something of a miracle I have to say. Ma, HuaQiang was definitely not even thinking about anything close to baptism about 1 month ago and to see the change of heart that he has experienced is pretty amazing. Unfortunately, his mom, who was also scheduled to be baptized this weekend was forbidden rather strongly by her husband for some reason that we don't fully understand. We did try to convince him otherwise. We tried to strike a deal where we'd teach her English if he let her be baptized, then we tried to convince him it wouldn't affect her ability to find work (which seemed to be his major concern) and that there was absolutely no downside to getting baptized (which there really isn't). In any case, it came down to him being really really stubborn and obstinate in his opposition and there was nothing we could say or do that would change his mind. Really weird since he didn't care about his kids getting baptized. In any case, kind of a tough concern to resolve. She's really ready to be baptized but he is definitely not having it.

Our other investigator meant to be baptized yesterday, Carlyn Chen, was very very close. She's a 16 year old girl in high school and really acts her age, or perhaps younger than her age.
Whatever the case, we were a little pressed for time and so taught her a rather long lesson on Saturday afternoon where we basically taught her almost everything haha. Kind of a mainland China gospel teaching approach. Then she had her baptismal interview where she insisted she wanted to try alcohol and coffee later in life because she wanted to know what they tasted like. Basically a rather ridiculous concern which is probably not the true root of her concern.

However, we'll spend some more time teaching her and hopefully help her cultivate a stronger desire to be baptized and some stronger faith in Christ that will allow her to overcome concerns. Hopefully be able to shoot for the end of January or early February for her date.

Have I told you about our district leader by the way? Elder Jin from XinJiang? I think I probably have... but in any case, I asked him yesterday how big the branch is in Urumuqi and he was like "6 people" haha. Him, his parents, his aunt, his grandma, and his cousin. Pretty sweet ratio of full time missionaries to members now though ha. He's a pretty funny guy and speaks really good Chinese. Hopefully I can use my guanxi with him to get to go out to visit XinJiang again and see some more sights. Pretty cool place.

So we had a pretty crazy day yesterday. First off, yesterday was stake conference so we had to find transportation for our investigators and members to get from Chinatown all the way down to Pacifica. Then, once we got there, we discovered that they hadn't brought any of the translation equipment which I was absolutely baffled at because I had totally thought about it the day before but was just like "nah they definitely have it under control". They didn't. So we raced back to the Sunset chapel, grabbed the equipment, and raced back and I translated for the last hour and 15 minutes. It went pretty well actually. I think my ability to translate has actually improved a lot from all the practice I got in Union City. I'm at least the most qualified to do it here in the Chinese branch in San Francisco anyway.

Anyways, then we had the baptismal service immediately after... or so we thought. We ended up waiting for like 40 minutes listening to prelude while the bishop of the Samoan Ward (we combined our baptism with theirs) made us wait while he was in a meeting or something. It was very ridiculous since we had President Wade and President Pearce (our branch president) in attendance so we totally could have and should have started without him. Very frustrating. However the baptism itself went well and HuaQiang bore a pretty great testimony at the end.
Then, that night we had a missionary stake correlation meeting with President Wade and the stake president Dillinder and then we had a fireside called "why I believe" which we were assigned to organize and conduct this month. It was pretty ridiculous. Fortunately, as is usually what happens when you do your best and pray a lot, it all went very well. Why I believe had a really really small turnout but ended up being one of the most spiritual meetings I've attended as a missionary and just in general. It was pretty sweet.

Yeah pretty crazy finally running into Lynn and Anette at the Daly City Chapel. It was good to see them again.

Good to hear us Mormons are looking up in the whole public media arena. Hope Romney can get elected... although that would probably not be a good thing since I don't think anybody really likes the President no matter who it is haha. Pretty thankless job. Can't please anyone.
I'll send my iPod along today probably. When is the class signup time for the fall semester anyways? Probably not for a while... right?

Anyways, I'm excited for the coming week. We had a bunch of trainings and stuff last week that took up a bunch of our time so we hope to be able to use our time effectively this week and really make things happen. We're gonna start teaching Alice Luo's parents who she's like "get them baptized!!!" Haha and we're gonna teach another one of her friends who is 16 years old here in San Francisco. We have a goal to have 5 baptized in February and definitely have the faith to get it done.

Love you! Have a great week!