Food and friends gathered around the table…Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Obviously here in Taiwan, Thanksgiving isn’t that big of a deal, but we still had a good time!
While on a mission, you can never have too much on your plate!
Actually, on Sunday, after church, our branch had a small Thanksgiving activity where there was lots of food and we all ate together! We even had our entire stake presidency come down to visit our branch and teach a class yesterday.
Brother Gunn
We have two members in our ward who are American and are married to someone here in Taiwan; we’re having a Thanksgiving meal tonight at the house of one of them, which should be fun.
The girls from left to right in the photo below: 新妹妹 (brother singletary’s step-daughter, she lives with her dad usually), 唐妹妹, 唐妹妹 (this is the older sister), 蔡妹妹 (蔡弟兄’s daughter), 羅小姐 (Janet – in her last year of high school)
Friday night we took the fastest train down to TaiDong – which took about an hour – and spent the night at the apartment of the elders there. The next morning, Saturday morning, we had a nationwide church sponsored running activity; it made it much easier for us to get there instead of having to take an early morning train.
You should participate…it’s a sign!
When we were about to sleep at the other elders’ apartment, we had a surprise – four more elders walked in at like 11:15pm or so. We weren’t expecting there to be any more, so it was quite the surprise. That ended up keeping us all awake until about 1:30am…and then we had to wake up at 4:30am to get ready and then take a taxi over to the park to help set up everything for the activity.
The event was themed “endure to the end” and was for the entire island in celebration of the 60 years of missionaries being in Taiwan.
We don’t mean to toot our own horns, but it was a pretty amazing event!
There’s no time like now…to share the gospel!
蔡弟兄 is in the picture below…he ran the event with the stroller. He, his wife, and their four children are in my branch. He teaches English in middle school.
唐妹妹 ran on her own. She and her family, the 唐 family, are in our branch as well.
At the activity, we actually met one of the members who is in the pamphlet for lesson 3 – The Gospel of Jesus Christ! He was just randomly asked to have a picture taken of him, so he agreed and now he’s in the pamphlet!
My brush with celebrity!
A few older photos that haven’t been used yet. (The perks of being the mom….
This last week had a couple of cool experiences finding people. I’ve been going through our former records for a while now and I started calling some of them. The record for this one family said they were super nice, so I decided to call them – they were happy to set up a time to meet with us! But it gets better – first they switched their appointment to a dinner (they wanted to feed us) and then when we were there, they told us something they thought was really cool. The dad had been reading this book by a German philosopher and had just gotten to the part where it said that God is dead – right when he read that, his phone rang…it was me! The family all thought that was a sign from heaven that God isn’t dead! They’re actually already Christian and believe in God, but in the past they keep telling missionaries that they’re just not prepared for the things we’re teaching. They told us this too, but we think that we can try out some new things and hopefully get them baptized! They like missionaries so they definitely want us to come over again.
…I get to add MY favorite pictures! lol)
Another experience was yesterday night when we didn’t really have anything to do – it was a Sunday, nighttime, and raining fairly well, which basically means that most places will be closed and there will be pretty much no people on the street. We decided to go try knocking on some doors in this one area. My companion went to one house and they were immediately not interested because they said they were Buddhist. Next, I thought we should go this one direction until we got to a certain house that looked like a good place. We knocked on the door and this older woman answered. She was nice and listened to us, but she was already Christian and kept saying that all the churches are exactly the same; we left a tract on her front porch and left. After that, I decided to go through a couple of alleys until we came out on this other side of the community. Right when we came out of the alley, there was this house that had lights on and some shadows inside indicating that there were definitely people there. We went up and knocked – a woman answered, told us to come in, and then ushered us into another room which had her son (I’m assuming) in it. She brought us chairs and then closed the door so we could talk to him. Although we definitely had not, it felt as if we had already set an appointment with them and they were expecting us. The son was in his twenties and is currently serving his mandatory military service. He goes to a different area in Taiwan for about two weeks at a time and then comes back for one weekend – he only has about two and a half months left of this though. We talked with him about God, Christ, and baptism, and was able to set him up with a baptismal date! He said we can call him everyday and even video chat him if we want (since he’s out of town most of the time for military service). I’m pretty positive that he’ll be baptized – it might take a bit longer because of his schedule with military service, but he can do it!
– Elder Austin Simonson
文長老