CALLED TO SERVE: Service and No Bikes

7/8/16

助人為快樂之本 - The foundation of happiness is service to your fellowmen.

This makes our second week in Hualien without any bikes. The company that was supposed to deliver our bikes the first week of the transfer has taken quite a while to get the bikes down to us, so it has been pretty hard to get around and visit all of our investigators. This situation may or may not have led to the use of two people on one bike, jogging, and rollerskates. Hopefully they come this week though.

Our investigators are doing really well, but recently a few of them have hit some hard obstacles. 張寶心 Zhang Bao Xin is feeling really insecure about baptism and struggles to keep commitments like church, scriptures, and prayer, 張安夫 Zhang An Fu is hard to read whether or not he has 'felt the song of redeeming love' because he is old and doesn't speak much, 劉英怡 Liu Ying Yi is super poor so she might be moving out of her apartment this next week to avoid paying rent, 陳佳宜 Chen Jia Yi still hasn't gotten her phone in order so that she can call and meet with us, and 王雅慧 has reached a dead-end in terms of getting her parents to let her be baptized. Right now we are working on a lot of awesome potentials who should become really good investigators soon.

We did a scripture class on Saturday night (saturday night is the only time that people in Taiwan don't have work. I'm totally serious though. Most work 6 days a week. The kids are in school all day long. It is summer vacation, but most kids aren't even home because they are in cram schools during the day), and even though not many people came, our reading of Mosiah 4 was super awesome. We talked a lot about service and taking care of both temporal and spiritual needs of all our friends and family. While talking about service, someone shared a proverb: "助人為快樂之本". I'm not exactly what the direct translation is, but basically the idea behind it is that we should serve people out of a loving heart and not because we want anything in return. It just really struck me how important the condition of our hearts while we serve is. Much like faith without works is dead, service without charity is equally dead. Really fun thing to study. I love you all and hope you have a great week!!

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haha I struggled taking pictures this last week...