Week 31

Hello from TaiDong! It was a great opportunity to be able to learn more about Chapter 8 at our special training. I thing I learned and benefitted from most was the training done by the Assistants afterwards. They taught about how to get 30 minute lessons (not 45-50). This is crucial because the Spirit should be the teacher in all we teach and learn. We should not put ourselves in a higher position to answer all their questions and resolve all their concerns, because the Spirit will be the teacher whose influence will be eternal. He teaches to our souls -- disregarding any physical limitations. I am also so grateful to have become Senior companion with Elder Braithwaite. He helps me so much in things I forget and my shortcomings. I'm trying to fulfill my responsiblities to the best of my abilities. We're getting along really well. We haven't seemed to run into any problems so far. Our biggest trial so far has been being on time. But we're finding ways to overcome it :). And haha yes, I actually miss MiaoLi and Elder Su a lot. Elder Braithwaite is originally from Boston, but his family moved to Alpine, UT when he was still pretty young. His Chinese is really good! He speaks really dignified speech. I'm grateful to be able to serve with him. It's his 4 transfer, so I'm only older than him 1 transfer. So we're both still fresh, but I feel we're carrying out the work pretty well. TaiDong seems to be doing good. It's been hard for Guonian because a bigger part of our investigators have been students going back home. But we've done what we can, and we found some pretty great people. Right now we have a lot of slow/not progressers. It's been great getting to know the TaiDong 2nd branch (the divider line is a street the chapel is on. We're the south side). It turns out that our family knows President Cai (the District President) very well. They were at my house last August visiting my parents. Speaking of branches. There are a lot of trees here, which is a little different from MiaoLi. Otherwise the two places are about the same. Oh...right. Also speaking of branches, the Hualian zone of our mission is the last one with branches -- the rest are wards throughout Taiwan! So we're pushing hard to have a lot of conversions so that we can continue to build this place. TaiDong also has a lot of Aboriginese (Yuan2 Zhu4 Min2). A lot of them are Christian. We're thinking it's because of when Portugal was in Taiwan. So it'll be a different challenge to talk to those who already have their own beliefs in Christ. But I'm also super excited to be able to work with the people here. We have some awesome members here. The one most famous with the missionaries is Jerry Lin. He was baptized last year on (normal) New Years' Day. He's simply amazing. He's our Mission Leader for the 2nd branch. Basically he does everything for us. He drove us to the train station, peiked twice, bought us lunch and dinner, cleaned the chapel grounds, bought us a Buddha-head fruit, all in one week. It's amazing to see these kind of examples of Christlike people all over the world! (Like all of you!) The two most likely to be baptized in the near future are a Xu3dx and a Lin2dx. Xu3dx so far only has curiousity, but he is willing to do all that we invite him to do. Hopefully he'll do our invites with enough desire to be able to feel of these invites' power. We just met Lin2dx this last week. He seems to be really spiritual. He came to church, and he said when he meets with us he feels a different, peaceful feeling. He didn't pray after our first meeting, so that was a little disappointing. But he still has very good potential. He expressed a desire for a fulness of truth -- and we haven't even talked about the restoration yet! It's interesting how people understand these concepts deep inside, and hopefully we will do our part to identify these truths from the Savior and His Gospel. Yay! Guo4Nian2! (Chinese New Year). We already got invited over for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. and we have lunch and dinner arranged for this entire week. We've been hearing a lot of firecrackers and fireworks. It was great to see everyone at their houses yesterday, enjoying their time with their family. Hopefully I won't get as fat as everyone says I will for GuoNian :P Thank you for all your emails and letters! I love you all!- -Elder Liu