Patience Turns Burdens Into Blessings

    Elder Puzey and I have been working with a lot of part-member families this last week to see if there are any unbaptized family members or anyone that would be interested in returning to church. So far haven't found any golden people that are going to get baptized, but found a cool family of four that we might be able to get back to church! Super cool! Huang Bo Chao is probably our closest to baptism. His date is for June 1st. His problem is that he still doesn't feel that the church is true, and so we are helping him develop that testimony that Christ's gospel has been restored. We send him texts with scriptures every day. I'll let you know how he keeps progressing!

    Last week in news headline format: two missionaries deliver cookies from a box mix to local members! Elder Hawkes eats weird Filipino food (including wrapped and fried bananas) with seven women, one man getting baptized next Saturday, and an Assistant to the President! Elder Hawkes also eats shark and large intestine of a pig! Two Americans infiltrate the Gold Dragon Tower (金龍寶塔) ash-burial facility and escape through spider-infested and overgrown stone paths through the Taiwanese jungle! Dirt City 土城 Elders Puzey and Hawkes teach powerful lesson to investigator only interested in learning English, then turn around and teach an investigator that wants nothing to do with the church other than getting married in the temple with their RM girlfriend!

    Ok, so maybe I'm not going to make headlines over Trump and Korea and all that jazz, but it was a fun week! Continuing with my weekly Christlike attribute study, this last week was about patience. Four things really impressed me as I studied patience that I had never really thought about before. (1) Patience turns burdens into blessings. (2) Patience is almost never sitting around and waiting, but rather working hard to do everything we can in obtaining a result and then accepting the Lord's timing. (3) Having an eternal perspective fuels and undying supply of patience. Selfishness and shortsightedness often lead to a bad case of impatience. (4) Anger, frustration, and anxiousness--when looked at through the right lens--are just patience practice. I have loved learning about patience and especially how these four principles were so deeply ingrained into the life of our Savior. I know that as I become more like Christ, I can help my investigators do the same. I love you guys, have a great week!

Buddhist general conference.

Pig's large intestine.

Cookies that we baked and gave to members (one exploded in my bike box....... I still ate the crumbs).

Photo shoot at night.

Meeting with the investigator that gave us the Toyota hats we were modeling.

Hiked along one of the coolest paths ever. The jungle was just so alive!! You could literally breathe in the life force as you walked on these rock paths. You could hear some sort of insect or frog or something croaking.

 

Ok, that old monk guy straight up grabbed that bee with his fingers, walked it over to a bush, and set it down. It was still kind of alive!!!!!!!!!

Panorama for days

The mountains are blossoming with this cool kind of tree. They are all over the place! The mountains are just speckled with these awesome white flowers.

P.S...Just ate a pig's large intestine after I finished skyping, also, Quentin L. Cook is visiting our mission this Saturday.

Honor and Miracles

Two awesome miracles this last week!

 

    (1) Last Preparation Day, we went and took a bus to the northernmost part of Taiwan. On the way home, our bus got stuck in heavy traffic and we ended up getting home really late. I felt so bad, and because of the delay we were super short on time. After a quick meeting with our Ward Mission Leader, we hit the staircase to hop on our bikes and book it to the other end of town for a lesson we were late for. As we were descending, a Dad and his daughter were walking up the stairs. He asked who we had stopped by to see, and despite being late, we talked to him. Turns out, he had interest in coming to just see how our church is. He was super awesome, and it was a testimony to me that if we take moments out of our busy lives we can see miracles. 

 

    (2) We were biking on our way to the chapel when all of a sudden there was all this construction in the way. We tried to get through anyway, but a lady stopped us and said, "You can't go through here!" In my head I was like, "Lady, I'm on a bike! Bikes can go anywhere!" Well, we decided to turn down this side alley to get around the construction, and as we went down the narrow alley we saw a guy smoking behind a restaurant in a little fenced-in area. It wasn't convenient to talk to him, so I just said a quick hello and kept biking. About 30 seconds later, it hit me. I had been deflected down this tiny little alleyway that I had never been on before and there was only one person on that road. The impression then came--you need to go talk to him. When it's that clear, you don't need much encouragement. I went back and talked with him for a good 15 minutes through the fence and got his phone number to meet with him later. There you go, when you run into life's "construction zones", instead of complaining like I did, ask yourself questions like these: "Is God trying to tell me something? Am I supposed to learn something?" That is when you see the hand of the Lord, guiding you towards the person He wants you to become and using you to help guide others towards the people He wants them to become.

    This week was Humility Week, and I found it incredibly interesting just how many things fit under humility: gratitude, unity, taking advice. I'd like to share one from the New Testament. John 5:41&44, "I [Christ] receive not honor from men. How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only?" Preach My Gospel defines humility as a "willingness to submit to the will of the Lord and to give the Lord the honor for what is accomplished." Ok, last reference. Websters dictionary (yes, I bought an English dictionary for my mission) defines honor as good name, reputation, title, or outward respect. 

    From those three references, I would make the argument that a big aspect of humility is where we get our honor from. Do I care more about what Suzie Hodgkins thinks about my hair or about what God thinks of my scripture reading? Am I worried about the notes people are taking about me on their iPhone 9 in the supermarket or am I more worried about the notes angels are writing in permanent marker? Good thing we have Christ going through and ripping out pages we are willing to give up, because I think we care way too much about the honor of others rather than the honor that "cometh from God only". I love life, I love the mission, and I love nothing more than my Heavenly Father telling me that what I am doing is right. I hope to seek that more and more. Love you guys! Have a great week!

Went to a gorgeous beach right next to where we biked to two weeks ago. Took the bus this time though so we could have more time.

I got to baptize the Sisters investigator named Albee! She is Vietnamese, and we contacted her on the street. We pulled up to an intersection and she yelled across at us, "Hi!!!!!" We waved back, and then the light turned green. We both were turning the same direction though, so we caught up to her at the next red light and started talking to her. She promptly gave us two whole grocery bags of home-cooked pastries, and we flusterdly gave her an English tract. She came that night to English class, started meeting with the Sisters, and the rest is history!

I am a nut. Do you see the size of this bamboo pole???? I got sooooo many weird looks.

Me shredding on a guitar, and then me shredding a guitar.

    No changes this last transfer, so I'm still in TuCheng with Elder Puzey to finish off the last transfer of my mission. He goes home in August, so he isn't that far behind me. He is such a great guy! He is from a ranch in Idaho, and the oldest on both sides of his extended family. He is a really good missionary and gets a lot of stuff done, even if he feels like his mission hasn't gone exactly the way he has wanted it to. With regards to the key indicators, he feels like he has kind of struggled his whole mission to be really successful and wishes he had this solid rock of a testimony. He feels it is still a little shaky, and so we have had lots and lots of talks about faith and testimony and all kinds of other things. I love companions like that, because we just talk and talk and learn so much from each other. He likes to think of himself as having a 'simple mind', and doesn't over-complicate things. I have learned a lot about that from him, and am excited to keep learning more for my last transfer. 

Oyster omelet.

My bike tire vs. new missionary bike tire.

Lots of pictures this week.... homemade lighthouse.

Extraordinary amount of lightbulbs on the beach.....

At least we can sleep well assured that the crabs of the Taiwanese strait will make it home safe tonight. Can't say the same for the beached jellyfish.....

Check out the teenager-infested maze. You would think a cow would have more interest in the centripetal velocity of a yo-yo than a teenager would be in a 3-foot-tall maze.... but hey. It makes for a good glamour shot background.

 

Wang Jun Xian's Conversion Story

4/2/17

His name is 王俊賢 Wang Jun Xian, and he met Sister missionaries on the street if I remember right. He started meeting with Elders because of the rule we have in our mission that if they are single they have to meet with missionaries of the same gender. By the time I had gotten here, he was well on his way to baptism and had received most of the lessons. When they started meeting with him, he was in a pretty bad state. He hardly got any sleep and just wasn't happy. He didn't have good friends, and they wanted to go out drinking with him all the time. The Elders before me invited him to exercise daily and get more sleep as part of the word of wisdom, and he started doing it as well as reading scriptures and praying. He said it completely reversed his life. During the day he would have so much more energy, and he became a lot more healthy. As he started living the word of wisdom and learning the gospel, he said he became happier and happier, and eventually decided to leave behind all his friends from before in search of new and better friends that would actually make him a better person. Now he has a picture of the temple as his home screen on his phone, and wants to introduce his girlfriend in China to the gospel so they can get married in the temple. He sharpens knives professionally and sells top of the line kitchen knives for a living. Super cool!!!