Week 89

SPRING TO SUMMER

This last week was a growing experience for me.  As I got my new companion, Elder Williams, we were ready to go out and help our investigators start to progress towards baptism and confirmation. However, it seems that there was a shift this last week from Spring to Summer and it had a big affect on our investigators. Many of the investigators we were regularly meeting with either left Tainan or have begun to lose their interest in the church.  So, we have a work to do. We have people out there we need to go find. We still have a few investigators who are progressing, but for the most part we need to go out and find new and ready people, people who truly have an interest in the gospel of Jesus Christ. So I need you all to pray for me. Pray that we are able to find people who truly have a desire to find the truth. 

I remember well the last time I ran into a situation similar to this. I was in Zhanghua and I had just begun training Elder Hampton. We had found some new investigators, however it seemed that all the investigators we found did not have a genuine interest in the gospel. So, we decided to go out and find those who were truly prepared to hear the gospel. As we prayed hard and worked hard, we were led to those who were ready to hear our message. That was the week we met Peter Luo, who was baptized recently. It was also about the same time we met Claire and Sister Lin, the two ladies who got baptized in Zhanghua as I left. I have a burning testimony that there are those in our area who are truly waiting for this message and I really want to find them.  I want to find more people like Peter, and Claire and Sister Lin.  So, please pray for me for this next week.

This last week was a good time with Elder Williams, though. He is a good missionary!  And he is even taller than Elder Redding. He's 6 ft 5 in!  And I think I already told you he is from Arizona.

We were able to visit the Chen family again this week. They are the family of the investigator, Brother Chen, that we have been teaching lately. It was a really enjoyable time at their house, but we are not sure if they truly want to come and investigate the church yet. They may just be being nice by letting us go over and talk with them. However, we invited them to begin to pray as a family and also pray individually this next week. We will see what happens. 

This next week is going to be a really interesting and a really fun week. We got a call last week informing us that we are going to have a Taiwanese youth missionary serving with us all week. He is about 17 I think, and every year they have an activity that allows the youth to serve with full-time missionaries for about a week to see what missionary work is like. So, we are going to pick him up in about an hour from the train station and he will stay with us till next Monday. 

We also have our new president now! So, this week we will have some extra meetings. Tomorrow we are going to MLC (missionary leadership council) where all the zone leaders are going to meet President Teh. Then we also have zone training meeting on Wednesday and we are in charge of that. On Thursday we have a "Meet the President" meeting over in a different zone. We are going to do it with three zones total and we are all going to have the chance to meet President Teh. And I got a call from the assistants last week and they told me I had to conduct that meeting! So, pray for me for that too...

I am excited for the MANY awesome miracles we are going to see this week!

Love you guys!

Elder Quist