It's Been a While...

Excerpts from Chris' letters to catch up a bit:

 8/11/13 (One year!)

Hey everyone!

This week was pretty okay!

The biggest news is that Z DX is progressing and I gave him a baptismal date for September 7th! He seems like he's going to be alright to hit it too! He calls his Pastor a lot still and isn't sure about some of the things we teach, but he's praying a lot and there is improvement. We met with him EVERY day this week. He came to church and to a YSA fireside with us. He shares things in church and the branch is being very kind to him. YAY!

We also had a chance to sit down with a member's cousin on Saturday; he comes to church and participates in the choir quite a bit, but never has really had formal lessons or anything. While we haven't given a specific goal yet, he doesn't have much of a problem with getting baptized. He's really busy, but if we have a chance to meet with him this week, we're going to formally invite him to be baptized as well. 

Last Monday after we emailed, an English student took us, the HuWei Elders and Pinocchio to Hua2Shan1; it means "splendid mountain" and it actually is quite a beautiful place. The mountain does have Word of Wisdom issues though as it is used to grow Oolong tea, coffee and THOUSANDS of beetel nut trees.

You should all be interested to know that I have put a new food in the #1 spot on my "weird things I've eaten" list. At the night market on Saturday night I ordered bone marrow soup. And no, it's not soup made with bone marrow. It's basically a bowl of soup with two thick bones inside. What you do is stick a straw inside the bone and drink the marrow. yup. I drank bone marrow. Once most of it is gone, you spoon the soup inside the bones to be sure you got all the marrow out. Is anyone vomiting yet? . The consistency was basically warm, soft gelatin. It didn't have a big flavor, but was slightly salty. Bone Marrow FTW (for the win)!

I guess that's basically everything worth writing about. I love this area, I love Taiwan, I love this work and I love the Lord. Challenges will only make us stronger if we choose to let them. 

Love you all!

8/19/13

 

This week wasn't too shabby! We had planned to tract near the church one morning and upon arrival, we saw a man standing outside of the doors to the church; he looked like a salesman, but we talked to him and he said he met with missionaries about 5 years ago; he lives in GuKeng, one of our secondary areas, and said that Christ led him to the church (on foot) and timed it perfectly so that someone was there to see him. We arrived less than a minute after he did. We all went inside at sat down and got to know him a bit. When we brought up baptism he said he's been baptized; at first we thought he was a less active, but when we asked some people in the Branch about him (including the previous branch president) nobody had heard of him. He was possibly baptized in another church. Anyway, we're going to meet with him again later on and understand his situation a little better. If he's not already a member, he's very prepared to be!

That was pretty cool. The Lord has great timing! Things like that happen several times every week. This week we had a few times where we were wondering what to do, so we prayed and either during the prayer or immediately after, something is given to us; we've had spontaneous lessons, members needing help or priesthood blessings (4 this week! One in a hospital for a little boy), remembering things we needed to do this week, etc, etc. 

A lady brought her beagle to church and insisted that he'd behave when she was told he needed to go outside. Every hour was interesting and full or barks, howling, dog farts and strange smells (which where probably the farts). The lady also left for a few minutes during sacrament meeting and came back with a sandwich that was steaming hot and made the chapel smell like meat.  

8/25/13

The DouLiu Branch is pretty awesome... and we're working really hard in coordination with the new Sister Missionaries to strengthen and build it up. This next week we're going to focus on starting home teaching.

Yeah, that's about it as far as the work for this week :\

During the Typhoon we went to a secondary area (LinNei) and had 8 lessons. Of course we had the most lessons planned on the day with the worst weather :) It was fun though. Kinda adventurous and exciting with empty roads and constant thunder and lightning! After the typhoon, there was a quick lightning storm that was SUPER loud and close. Pretty cool!

9/1/13

Happy September/Labor Day!

This week was really slow for the work because of DOUBLE Typhoons. It rained for 3 days straight. I was soaked before even getting on my bike every day. The rivers were swollen x200 and the trains shut down due to a flooded bridge. Many roads were flooded and damaged too, but all is well for me! The HuWei elders got stranded in a secondary area because of a flooded road and they almost had to come to our apartment to sleep. Luckily a member picked them up and found a really long round-about way to get to their main area. 

English exploded this week. Last week my class had 3 people. this week it had 22. I don't know what happened. A taxi driver that we invited and talked to for a while came too! It was pretty awesome. Kinda crazy though. 

This week I ate pig-ear ham. It was spicy ham with very chewy strip of pig ears inside. Took a while to eat. Kinda strange. I'll probably have it again. This week I'm going to eat a very special egg. More special than century eggs. It's a duck egg that has a partially-developed duck inside. Oh yeah. I'm a moron. People think I'm crazy/amazing (mostly members and missionaries) for eating all this stuff. A member said it's refreshing to have a missionary that embraces the food of Taiwan. Most won't even touch the stuff I've tried usually. Lol. they're just picky eaters. :) 

The numbers for this week were very unimpressive due to the typhoons and exchanges. However, we did total the number of people that have been rescued since I move to DouLiu. 16 people, including two 4-person families, have come back to church. Yay! now I just need to baptize someone! ;) Pinocchio is also no longer a Recent Convert. He hit his 1-year mark on the 31st! So yeah, I went on exchanges with Elder H this week. He's the new missionary being trained in HuWei. He's SUPER good. His chinese is awesome and he's not shy of people. I also took him to Feed Me to eat the giant burgers. It's an unspoken rule that elders must successfully eat a giant Feed Me burger  before leaving Taiwan. It's really hard. I've done it 3 time though. Made 2 other attempts.