“Clearing cookies” at the fireside
This week went pretty well! We were able to get about eight people to come to church in two different wards for varying amounts of time. In order to get more people to church next week, we will be making pancakes! Hopefully that will encourage people to come…and better yet, to come early. We’ll also encourage members to come early to eat pancakes (hopefully with their friends that they *should* be inviting!).
My old roomie…good to see ya, bro!
I also happened to stumble across a returned missionary who came back to Taiwan for an internship – Elder Huntsman (aka Paul)! He’ll be here for a couple months working at one of the banks. That’s probably a pretty good idea – one would get to keep practicing their Chinese and learning more! I’ll have to think about something like that after I go back home to the US as well.
On Tuesday, we attended zone conference over in a place called Taoyuan (桃園) for six hours. I thought it was pretty good! We were told to do a lot of things that I’ve been trying to get people to do for a while now (visiting/working with members, there are many more effective things to do other than street finding, etc), but they won’t really even try (well…at least with the people I’ve worked with). I think it’s because too many missionaries are stuck in this conceptual box of what a missionary is. They feel like if they’re not outside melting on the sidewalk in order to talk to people all day, then they’re not effective. Fun stuff. We also were instructed to actually get our bikes repaired and not do stupid things on the road, since President doesn’t want another missionary going home because of a bike accident (most accidents are the fault of us missionaries…someone got a concussion a few weeks ago from an accident and was sent home). Hopefully people will actually start doing more than just nodding their head in these meetings and actually start fully applying these practices.
Good times with Elder Puzey and the Li family! And yes, he still squeals like a little girl….
On Thursday, we went on exchanges with our zone leaders. I became companions with Elder Puzey for the day! The last time we were companions was about a year ago back in Tianmu. We had a great time in our lessons and with visiting some members. We had the chance to go visit the Li Family; the parents were baptized a while ago (the children were young at that point), but the children still haven’t been! The missionaries there have the chance to keep meeting with them and can hopefully help get them baptized!
Say hello to soon to be baptized Jim!
Tomorrow, one of our investigators has his baptismal interview! His baptism was originally scheduled for this Saturday, but in order to have time to find people to give talks as well as to invite people, we decided to move it to a week from Saturday. It should be awesome! We bought a white shirt for him and gave him a tie so that he’ll look more formal at church. Yay Jim!
– Elder Austin Simonson
文浩竣長老