Chinese New Year!

新年快樂！恭喜發財！紅包拿來！This week was Chinese New Year! You can sort of think of it as the time from Christmas to New Years in America. It lasts about a week and EVERYONE is off of work. Which means not a single store is open and the streets are vacant. Since there's no where to eat the members feed the missionaries EVERY meal for about a week. Also, they all compete to see who can feed the missionaries the biggest and best tasting meals. So basically I haven't felt hungry for a whole week now. Because the streets are pretty vacant most of the days, our Mission President has every missionary also do a deep cleaning of their apartment. So this whole last week just felt like going from a huge lunch at a member's house, back to our apartment to clean, and then to a huge dinner at a member's house haha.

Even with not having much proselyting time this week we were blessed to find 4 new investigators this week. On Sunday night we went door knocking in HuKou and did not have a ton of luck but then there were two 17 year old young men walking down the street toward us. We started talking to them and they were willing to walk to a nearby 7-Eleven and listen to our message! One of them also creates his own dub-step like music and I beat boxed to some of his music and they freaked out and loved it haha. We shared our message with them and they were amazed by prayer and the fact that we can really communicate with God.

The two other new investigators we had this week was a result from the family (mom and son) that we knocked into last week. They invited us back this week and said that they wanted their dad and other son to be there to listen to our message too! We taught them how family prayer could bless their family and I'm so excited to see them start to pray on their own and see how it changes their family. It's my favorite thing in the world to teach families because it reminds me of my own family and I can testify to them about the blessings the Gospel brings families as I have seen it in my own family.

Highlight of my week is that I got to hold a cat and a hedgehog at a member's home...

Elder Smith (施德臻長老)