Cold and Rainy!

This week was super cold and rained everyday. As a result there weren't maybe people on the streets or wanted to stand and talk with us, so it was a little hard this week to find new people to teach. We only had 2 new investigators, Huang TX and Xu Yi Wen (20 year old clothing designer). I also had the chance to go on exchanges this week with Elder Triplett from my district, which was super fun. Even with the cold weather, we were still able to have some awesome lessons with our current progressing investigators.

We got to meet with Chen Zhi Teng this week, bad sadly his wife and daughter are still out of town until after Chinese New Year, so they weren't able to meet with him. We had an amazing lesson on the Plan of Salvation. He has been reading and praying and he said last time he prayed about the Book of Mormon he had "goosebumps and a calm, peaceful feeling". We discussed baptism and he said he's willing to work towards it. Sadly he moves into TaiZhong in about a month, so we'll have to figure out getting him passed off to the missionaries there.

We also met with Phines a few times this week and sadly it seems as if she and her daughters will not be able to be baptized because of family opposition, but we will keep working with them and see what happens.

Shaun, Tina, and Rosie are still doing super well. They're renovating their house a little bit to improve their English class. They teach English from their home to nearby Taiwanese children. We got to help them move a lot of new toys and furniture in, and also help them paint a few rooms! Shaun, the father, has had a difficult time the past several weeks accepting the fact that Nephi had to kill Laban in the Book of Mormon. For about 3 weeks no answer we gave him really satisfied him so we decided to find every scripture in the Bible that discussed the Law of Moses, wrote out the background of the entire story, and walked him through it all in our next lesson. After going through it all for about 30 minutes, he finally said he could accept this answer and was able to move on! We are now teaching the family commandments and hope that they can soon set a baptismal date.

One of the most exciting parts of this week was the Hong 洪 family! The mom and daughter (13 years old) came to English class again this week and then also set up for us to come by their house for a lesson on Friday night. On Friday night we taught the Plan of Salvation and it went very well. The daughter is an artist so we had her draw out the steps of the Plan of Salvation for us as we taught it, she loved it! The best part is that Saturday they also planned with us to go to our temple in Taipei and do a chapel/temple tour there. They absolutely loved it. They took tons of pictures of all the art and felt the spirit very strongly. We talked a lot about baptism with them, what we do in temples, and the importance of families. They are doing amazing and also came to church for the first time the next day! They got to know a ton of members and it was amazing for them. We hope they will also be able to set a baptismal date soon too.

Elder Smith 施德臻長老