Creative Transfers

11/20/16

Transfers! I am already in my new area, 天母 Tian Mu! Get this, it is right next to my first area in Taiwan, 北投 Bei Tou! I am super excited!! My new companion is Elder Heaton, straight out of Provo, Utah. He is in 'breaking', which means the transfer right after training. He was in the MTC with my last companion, Elder Dickson. He is such a boss! All the missionaries just love him because he is really funny and super hard working. He really loves the people and works super hard to serve the Lord. His Chinese is out of this world too! He already can read a lot of characters and say a lot of words that I was only learning a transfer or two ago. I am super excited to work alongside him and see a lot of success in my new area! 

    We met the new ward mission leader last week, who is such a fireball. About every other sentence or so it sounds like he says the word 'A', but in a long sweeping trill from the lowest end of his vocal spectrum to the highest--polished with the sparkle of a look of absolute astonishment at what he just heard either someone else or even himself say. I just about die every time I hear it. He has such a deep testimony and fire for missionary work that I honestly have never seen before. It is amazing what a testimony and a little bit of enthusiasm can accomplish, and he has the whole ward working hard on missionary work.

     Lastly, I would just like to share a quote I came across from our prophet Thomas S. Monson:

  "God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity in the cloud, the oil in the earth. He left rivers unbridged and the forests unfelled and the cities unbuilt. God gives to man the challenge of raw materials, not the ease of unfinished things. He leaves the pictures unpainted and the music unsung and the problems unsolved, that man might know the joys and glories of creation." 

What inspired words. There are many times in missionary work or even other aspects of life that I am just frustrated because there isn't this nice, fool-proof plan laid out for me that I just have to carry out. God leaves it to me and to us to come up with some solutions for ourselves, and to be creative about it, because He wants us to learn. What fun it is though once you find something that works! I hope you all have a great week!

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Daily Scoop

 - Monday - last preparation day in Hualien. Went down to GuangFu for the last time! I am going to miss the Fenglin area so bad. I saw so many miracles in my time there. Good news though! If the Elders there get this one family baptized there (which is super likely) they can open up the branch next year!!!!!!!!!!! How cool is that????

 - Tuesday - today was what I thought was my last district meeting as district leader, but I actually ended up still being the district leader in my new area, so I've got another transfer or two offering slave labor. Just kidding, but I was super excited to be a 東西 missionary without any responsibilities and it didn't happen. We had district meeting and it actually went super well. We talked about receiving personal revelation, and then we all took time to think about our personal mission goals while I went around to everyone and prayed with them with the intent to show them that there were many people praying for them every day. The rest of the day was basically saying goodbye to all the people I have worked with for the last half of a year. Unfortunately we couldn't find a lot of them, but that is ok.

 - Wednesday - got a call from President Jergensen telling us that our area was getting closed down, and then got the Ibon code in the morning telling us where we were headed for transfers! Our ward had three missionary companionships which was a ton especially for a small ward, and so he had to close our area. Elder Dickson is headed off to Miao Li, which is literally on the opposite side of the island. The very farthest he could have moved to. Miao Li is also pretty rural, so he got lucky without the culture shock of moving right into Taipei like I did. The rest of the day was packing, and we stayed up past midnight getting our area ready to pass off to the zone leaders. Also, learned how to say porcupine in Chinese: 豪豬. Ya!

 - Thursday - woke up at 5 to make the 6 o'clock train back up to Taipei. Had to go on my own from the mission office to my new area, and just about puked from the stress of not having someone breathing over my shoulder. I was seriously so nervous and antsy. My buddy Elder Reintjes (the one that visa waited with me) got called to be the new AP!!! Got to talk to him for 15 minutes, which was awesome. Got in my new area, and did a tour of it while we did some finding. Also had an incredible Missionary Correlation Meeting!

 - Friday - met with a super cool member that fed us lunch and gave us these incredible Chinese paintings that I will have to send you a picture of next week. Absolutely incredible. Then had a crazy weekly planning where I talked for about an hour with the other district leaders and zone leaders on a conference call about the zone baptismal goal for the next transfer. In the night we met our best investigators: Liang Family. Has a mom, dad, daughter, and son, all super cool! They have a ton of potential to get baptized, and even though the peike talked so much that the lesson went two hours and we didn't get to say anything, it was super fun to meet them!

 - Saturday - whole day of finding. Looks like this is a pattern here in TianMu, which might be a little rough. It was still pretty fun, but we only have two solid investigators so the rest of our time is just spent on the street finding.

 - Sunday - had a great talk by a white guy that spoke english, fasted for our investigators, and met a bunch of cool people finding during the night. Met one super cool guy. We had been finding for a long time, and we had just finished talking to this family that we had walked with for quite a distance but didn't have any interest. So we were out away from the big streets and the normal contacting areas without a bike, but then we started talking to this man in his 30s who told us after only a few pleasantries that he really needed help. He felt like his life recently has been really hard, and he has felt like he doesn't have anywhere he belongs. He used to be in the military where he made a lot of friends, but when he left he just really started struggling. We had a great conversation, and he set up for another time.