Referrals giving you referrals?

Had some cool experiences this week. It all started off on Monday night when we had one of our current investigators, Mr. Peng 彭, take us out for dinner at an all-you-can-eat BBQ. Not only was it a perfect opportunity to get to know our investigator better, he also brought one of our ward members and then 2 of his own friends who now became potential investigators for us! One of the people he brought was a Mr. Li 李. We got to know Mr. Li 李 really well during the dinner together and then got his contact information. We stayed in contact with him throughout the week and then he was willing to come to our chapel for a chapel tour! A few days later he invited us over to eat dinner with his whole family! Yesterday we got to meet his wife, two kids, and a few members of his extended family. Missionary work is so amazing when these awesome people you meet personally invite you to meet more of their family and friends! Our teaching pool in this area is just growing everyday and it's so special to see the hand of the Lord in it all.

We met with Mr. Yang 楊 this week and made sure that he was still down for baptism. We laid out for him everything he'd have to do between now and his baptismal goal on the 23rd of February and he was down! He is doing amazing and is completely willing to keep all of our invitations. I am excited to see his testimony grow from now till he's baptized. 

We took a roughly 2 hour train ride down to the more southern part, Taidong, of our mission this week to have a Zone Meeting along with exchanges with Elders Ward and Embley. I was able to go with Elder Ward and it was such a blast! I knew him previously from our freshman year at BYU together so we were just talking about past memories and future opportunities together the whole exchange. The most exciting part of the whole week was on the way home from Taidong. We already finished exchanges, so I was back with my typical companion, Elder Christiansen. We were enjoying hamburgers for lunch and then we lost track of time...we realized our train left in 20 minutes and we were still at 15 minute taxi ride from the train station! We called the taxi, and 10 minutes later the taxi showed up. We assumed we were going to miss our train now so we were trying to think how we could refund or trade our train ticket. Once we got in the taxi we told the driver we were pressed on time and our train left in 10 minutes. He said (in Chinese), "Buckle up...luckily I just changed my brakes and tires". After several minutes of much speeding, many back roads, the driver using his hand-break a ton, and sprinting to our train seats... we sat down on the train with 3 minutes to spare. All I'll say is the taxi driver got a big tip that day.

Elder Smith 施長老