Week 93

THAT WAS QUITE THE WEEK

This last week was a really special week. It was full of disappointments and miracles. I think that at one point we had about 40 lessons scheduled for the week (investigators and new potentials that we had met on the street). However, at least 20 of those lessons stood us up or cancelled. I remember we got to Saturday and I was just mad. I just didn't understand why people could not understand how important this message we are sharing is. I just didn't understand why everyone refused to give us a chance. I felt that there we were talking to so many people, but nobody was willing to hear. Isn't this the most precious and important message in the world? Why did nobody understand?

I still don't know all the answers to those questions, but yesterday the Lord gave me some answers. I realized that timing is important to Him. Not everyone is ready right now. I also learned that if one thing was true, it was that the Lord will never abandon anyone and nobody is a "lost cause" to the Lord. So, even though most people are lost, the Lord will be there as soon as they are ready to accept Him. 

I also had an experience that taught me charity. Last night we had a family home evening activity and our recent convert brought his friend. His friend is a very active christian in a different church. After family home evening, I went over to talk to him to see if he would be willing to meet sometime. He immediately asked me if we read the bible as a church. After which he told me how he had never heard of the Book of Mormon and that he was used to reading the bible. He then proceeded to ask me if I read the bible regularly and he then pulled out a bible scripture on a piece of paper from his wallet and asked me if I could tell him what it meant. I felt attacked during the whole thing. I felt he didn't really like our church, and I felt the way he was going about it all was very prideful. He then proceeded to tell me that he believed our church felt different than most christian churches, and the way he said it just made me feel offended.

So, we met with him this morning. He was going to return to school in Taibei, so he asked if we could meet this morning before he went back. We brought out bibles and we were ready to "open the scriptures" to him. Then the lesson we had with him changed my attitude. As we began to meet with him, I realized that he was actually really interested in our church and that also he had asked me all those questions about the bible and the Book of Mormon because he was genuinely interested in learning more. He turned out to be golden. A lost soul looking for the truth. I realized that I was offended during the conversation I had with him the night before because I was so used to be rejected and called out by other Christians that I immediately assumed his questions and his comments were all an attempt to attack. I assumed he was just another prideful Christian from another church, but then realized that maybe it was me who was being prideful. I learned that I need charity, for charity is essential in helping anyone accept this gospel. We will not build anyone's faith in this church by tearing down their faith in their own church. 

Another miracle we saw was getting seven people to church on Sunday! Our investigators are progressing now! The Wang family is doing really well and our new investigator 品逸is doing really well too. Next week is transfers. I hope I stay.

I love you guys! 

Elder Quist

Week 92

FINDING THE CHOSEN VESSELS

As you know, Elder Williams and I have been really focusing on finding the people who are truly prepared to hear this message. This last week I was studying in Moroni 7:29-31 and I read something I really liked. I read about how people who spread the gospel are to do it the Lord's way and they are to share repentance to the "chosen vessels."  I was thinking about what that meant and I think it means we are supposed to find the people who are really willing and interested in learning about this gospel. We have been praying hard for that... 

We have a new investigator from this last week. His name is Brother Xue. We found him at the park last Sunday with his daughter. He was sitting around the pond with his daughter and he told us how he has been recently looking for a new way of life. So, we scheduled a time to meet with him. We met with him and shared the first lesson and he loved it. Not only did he commit to coming to church for three hours, but he also committed to coming to a baptismal service and getting baptized at the end of August. He came to church on Sunday and made sure to take notes of the things he liked. We learned about the spirit in priesthood and he shared with us that while we were talking about the spirit, he had an impression that he as a father alone cannot raise his kids and he believes he needs to bring his family into this church in order to raise them. It was such a miracle!

We are also helping the Wang family progress. This last week we gave the older brother a baptismal goal. The sons also came to church on Sunday. They came to church and asked a lot of questions about getting baptized. It seems they are really interested.

We are also helping other people who have been showing real interest. We have a lady with the same Chinese last name as me who is currently investigating and she decided she wants to start bringing her son to church on Sunday.

And finally, we had an interesting experience this week. We were contacting when we talked to this lady who asked if we would go to her home and talk to her son. She told us that her son is really lazy and she wants him to start coming to church. So, we visited them on Saturday and her son really is very lazy.  He acted like he did not want to talk to us at all, but I was able to get to him in the end. It was his birthday yesterday, so we dropped off a present for him last night. The mom is really hoping he can get baptized, but first we need him to be willing to get off the couch.

Thank you for all the prayers! I will email more miracles next week, so keep praying for me!

Love you all!

Elder Quist

Week 91

MIRACLES FROM YOUR PRAYERS

This week we found more people who are willing to actually come and learn more about the church! We saw so many miracles this last week!

We continued to work with the Wang family (the family I told you about last week). We went back to their house this last week and met with the two sons (because the mother was busy during that time). We taught the sons the first lesson and they were really receptive to the message we were sharing. We invited them to be baptized and they accepted! However, yesterday they were unable to come to church because of an activity they had to attend. We are going to visit them again this week and I really hope we can help them start progressing faster!

Then we had another miracle where we visited the Chen family again (the family of the investigator we have been meeting with lately). We also met with them and shared the first lesson. The spirit that filled their home when we were with them was so strong! We invited them to sit down and pray about it as a family. They said they would that night. I have never been able to work with families in my mission, but I am so grateful now for these opportunities to work with these great families.

We met some cool new people this last week, too. We met a lady named Lilian who came to church yesterday and also a man who is interested in trying new religions. 

Yesterday, I met a man who was sitting at the park with his daughter. He told me that lately he has not been going to work because of some things that he is trying to figure out in his life. He has been looking to religion to an answer to some of the questions in his heart. I expressed to him that I could help him better understand the problems he is facing and the answers he could find and he immediately set up a time to meet with us.

Right after talking to him, I walked up and came across a whole pack of Jehovah's Witnesses. I don't know if this is their own rule, or a law in Taiwan, but they will never contact people themselves, they have to wait for people to come to them. So, I got too close to them and next thing I knew I was surrounded. There were probably about 20 of them. They started to ask me questions about missionaries. I was super afraid they were going to start bashing me (because the Jehovah's Witnesses here LOVE to bible bash). So, I slowly backed up while trying to give them a good testimony about our church. It was a pretty crazy experience.

This next week we have more investigators set up and more miracles waiting to happen. I can't wait for the great things coming our way!

Love you all,

Elder Quist

Week 90

A NEW WAVE

Things are really changing fast in this mission! We have a new mission president and he is not afraid to do things differently. I think he is going to be a really good president. I was able to meet him last week during MLC and I was really impressed with his humility and also his wisdom. I could tell that he has served as a member of the Seventy before. 

One of the changes with this new president is the elimination of the “Taiwan Taichung Rules and Clarifications” handbook. This is a handbook which has some specific rules and clarifications that are particular to our mission in addition to the white handbook. For example, every time a woman calls us on the phone, according to that handbook, we are required to put the phone on speaker. Even though this seems like a big change, I doubt it will really make any big difference in our mission. The rules inside that handbook were little small rules.

Also, we changed the rule when it comes to facebook. Starting today, we are no longer able to use facebook. It is okay though, because I always thought facebook was annoying to use, because it was so time consuming. If people want to talk to me, we can just use email.

As you know, we had our temporary missionary with us last week.  His name was Chen Wen Tai. He was really fun to have around for a week. I have always wanted to have a Taiwanese companion, so it was a good experience! 

The other good part about him coming was that he brought a lot of miracles! As you might have heard, there was a typhoon in Taiwan last week. However, the typhoon turned out to not be that big, so it just rained a lot. Since it was raining, we had to spend some time making calls inside. While making calls the day of the typhoon, we called a lady named Sister Wang. Apparently, she had met with missionaries a long time ago, but since the missionaries she was meeting with suddenly moved, she stopped getting visited by missionaries. So we went and visited her on Saturday night. We arrived and we met her and her two sons. She has one son who is 15 and one son who is 17. We sat down with them and talked about Heavenly Father and our purpose as missionaries. As we shared with her and her sons, the spirit was present. We invited them to come to church the next day and they came! They seem really willing to come and learn. She kept telling us that it was God's will that we called her that day, because she is usually too busy to set up, but because of the typhoon she had time. It was such a cool miracle!

I love you guys!

Elder Quist

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

Week 88

GOODBYE ELDER REDDING

Well, I have a new companion. His name is Elder Williams and he's from Arizona.  He seems like a really nice guy and I can't wait to get to know him.  We were really surprised when we got the news on Saturday that Elder Redding was going to move. He just got here, but because President doesn't want a bunch of zone leaders to go home the first transfer with Elder Teh, he put in a bunch of new zone leaders.

This last week we met a new family! We have an investigator who has been meeting with missionaries from before I got here and finally he allowed us to go over and visit his entire family. He has a son who is 17 and a daughter who is 14. They were all super cool. When we shared some of our experiences as missionaries, the mom of the family cried. It was such a great miracle.

At 6 o'clock Saturday night we had a lady in our ward get baptized, and Denny Wu, our investigator, was also going to get baptized that day... but he texted us and told us he could not get baptized because of family opposition. It was some sad news!  

But then after the baptism, we had a ward activity. It was a Hawaiian party. We had some Hawaiian pizza and we had a bunch of investigators come. Zi Gang and Sam both came. We also had a new investigator we met on the street come.  He came and he asked us a bunch of questions about missionary work.

The other miracle was a new investigator who came through english class.  After class we had a student come up to me and ask if he could get baptized! So, we met with him and he talked to us of how he regretted a lot of the decisions he made in his life and he really wanted to have a new start. So, we gave him a baptism goal. We hope that he can hit his goal. His name is Peter Chen.

Elder Quist

Ward Activity

Week 87

What a good week! We saw a lot of miracles. It also didn't rain as much! We met a lot of cool people this last week and the best part is some of them were families. This next week is transfers, I hope that President let's me stay here.

The first miracle happened this last Thursday. We originally planned on going a ways away to visit a couple of investigators at a college, but at the last second one of them cancelled, so we decided we would stay closer to our house and contact people. We had nothing going on that whole afternoon. I kind of just thought we should go to the college, because we had nothing better to do. However, I felt like it was the Lord's will that we didn't go. Finally, I found out why we didn't go! We were waiting at a red light, heading off to lunch, when a 16 year old kid biked up to my side. I started talking to him and asked if he wanted to go to lunch at the place we were going. He then told  me that he was planning on going to that place to eat lunch anyway! So we ate together. He told us that he was a christian, so while we were eating we decided to share the restoration with him. He seemed to really agree with all the things we were sharing, so much that he invited us to come and visit his family the very next day. So the next day we went over to his house, and we met his mother. Immediately she was frantic. She started to 罵her son in Taiwanese. However, because she was a nice lady, she decided to let us in anyway. We shared the restoration with her too. At first she was very stubborn and refused to listen. However, the spirit began to soften her heart. It was especially when we shared the first vision with her. Right before we shared the first vision, she kept bringing up these small problems. Then as we began to share the first vision, the room got really quiet. After that, she just listened. In the end of the lesson, she gladly accepted a Book of Mormon and she told us she really would read it because she really wanted to know if it was true. It was such a spiritual lesson. It also made me wonder how many people would accept the gospel if they just gave it a chance. It was such a cool miracle!

Then another great thing that happened was with our investigator 吳.  He is a student at the college and we met him a while ago because a missionary contacted his friend and his friend wrote down his number instead as a joke. But he was super willing and he started coming to church. However, as he was getting ready for baptism, his family came out and antied him getting baptized, so he started to abandon his baptism goal. On Saturday, we invited him to come to church and he said he really didn't want to come, because he didn't want to go against his family. We persisted and even asked if he would fast with us. Finally, he was willing. He came to church and fasted. During sacrament meeting the spirit was strong. The speakers were talking about faith. Finally, he opened up the pamphlet we have about baptism, read through it again, bowed his head, and he prayed. Then he leaned over to me and asked "What do I still have to do in order to get baptized?" We explained it to him and he may just be getting baptized this week! We will have to see though... I know that faith is so important. This gospel is true and anyone willing to live it will be blessed with a way to live it. 1 Nephi 3:7. God will provide a way!

It really was a great week!

I love you guys, 

Elder Quist