Week 27

Monumental Baptism

I had the great opportunity to have a pretty unique baptism this week. His name is David and we had been teaching him for a while. He was having problems with praying and reading everyday, and because of that he just wasn't progressing all that well. Finally, after teaching him again and again about the importance of reading and praying he finally got it down! He read and prayed for a couple weeks and we told him we wanted to reestablish his baptism goal. We asked him if we could set it for the first week of May and he responded by saying the last week in April sounds better. So we were super excited about it!

I was able to baptize David last Friday. I was a little nervous because I had to say the words perfectly, but everything worked out. Afterwards, we realized he would be going to the newly-formed QingShui Branch while we would be staying in the Shalu Ward.  Which means he is the first person to be baptized in the new QingShui branch! So MY FIRST baptism is also the FIRST baptism in the QingShui branch!  Pretty cool, right?

Then this weekend we also had our stake split. We had stake conference on Saturday and Sunday and we had two stakes participating because we were going to make those two stakes into three. Since we were creating a new stake, we had Elder Gong from the Asian area presidency come and his counselor, Elder Funk. And while we were waiting for conference to start on Saturday night, Elder Gong came up to us and shook hands with each of us. It was a neat experience to get to meet him. 

So we got to hear from Elder Gong and Elder Funk and our stake was changed from the Bei Taizhong stake (North Taizhong) to the Xi Taizhong stake (West Taizhong stake). And it turns out that David is actually also the first baptism in the new Xi Taizhong stake! Crazy!

We have a lot of good investigators right now! We have 2 good families we are working with, and 2 more who have good potential. That is really rare, families are hard to find on missions, you usually just teach individuals. But we are teaching a good family from Longjing who came to church last week and really enjoyed it. (I'm including a picture of them.)

I also had an unfortunate experience this week. We were playing basketball with investigators when I broke my favorite glasses. Besides that, the week was a good one!

Thanks for all your love and support,

Elder Quist

P.S. 

Happy Birthday Elin! You will be 3 when I get back, that's crazy! 

Congratulations Josh on graduating!