Christmas is in the air!

Super fun week! We started the week without much because I got here last Saturday. We made a goal to get 10 new investigators this week and didn't know how it would happen but we had faith and were ready do our part. We saw miracle after miracle the entire week and hit the goal of 10 new investigators on Saturday night. We found 3 families and several other individuals willing to let us in or come to the chapel for lessons and set up again. One family is a young mother and father with a 4 year old daughter (Chen陳 family). Another is a mother and father with two boys, ages 16 and 17 (Zhang張 family). The last one is an older man and his mother (Wang王 and Zhou周). 

This area is also super close to the ocean side so we get a lot of rain and it's SUPER windy. I found out this week that this city's nickname is "windy city"...great. Riding head in to strong wind isn't the easiest thing ever but it's fun haha. Our area has a small part in the busy city and then about a 40 minute bike ride through fields to the next part of our area which is super rural compared to my past area. There are a decent amount of homes but not many people outside, so we've done a decent amount of knocking lately. We were knocking in a super rural area and not seeing any success and were about to head back but then I felt like we should go down this one last street. We still didn't really see much success, but the last door we knocked had the Zhang Family. They let us in and we found out that they had 2 kids and they were willing to listen to our message and then invited us back for the next night too! Later their dad shared with us that he saw us walking down the street and then turned out all the lights and hid upstairs to pretend he wasn't home, but then a few minutes later he saw that we were still walking down the street but still had no intention on letting us in. We then rang his doorbell and he said he had no idea why but for some reason he opened the door and let us in. He said he felt like God was telling him that he needed to let us in. It's crazy to think that I was in the middle of no where in Taiwan on a freezing cold night to find this one family whose been prepared by God.

We also taught many lessons this week, and some of the most progressing investigators or Fu DX, Phines, and Shuan/Tina/Rosie (a South African family). This week has a lot of people from the Philippines and our area happens to also have the English speakers in our ward, so I've taught a ton of lessons in English lately which is a super weird change from only teaching in Chinese. Fu DX has a baptismal date for the 30th of this month, and it may need to be pushed back a week or two, but I know he'll make it! He went out of town this past Sunday but then was still willing to go to church in the area of Taiwan he was traveling to!

We also knocked into this one family who was willing to let us in a show us how to make homemade natural soap from oranges and how to make homemade mantou's (basically small rolls/bread), which was another highlight of the week!

Other than the families we met this week: Huang Ting (14 year old young man), Xu Cheng Yu (17 year old young man), Huang Tom, Ye DX, Xu Cheng Yu, Li Ming Hong.

It's also so fun to proselyte during Christmas time because we get to teach about what Christmas actually is! The people in Taiwan don't really celebrate it at all. One fun thing I've done is I bought a ton of clementines and with each person we talk to I also give them a clementine and tell them it's a Christmas gift! Super fun way to spread Christmas cheer!

Elder Smith ( 施德臻長老 )