Elder Ogden in Taipei: Week 2: The Betrayal

District Selfie

Nimen Hao!

So this week was a roller coaster of emotions. I missed you all so much but my love for the work also increased so much it's pretty bipolar but I love it! It's crazy that I've already been out for 2 weeks, but I also can't believe it's ONLY been 2 weeks. Time is strange like that.

In regards to the subject, Peng Jyemei is not an investigator. She's not even a non-member, in fact, she's actually our second teacher! We started to suspect that she spoke English soon after our second lesson with her, and we knew for sure when we asked her to download gospel library and it opened right up to Moroni 7 in English haha! She was a really good actor, but she definitely broke character when Elder Bateman was struggling to say a sentence in a lesson with her and she got fed up and said in perfect English "K Listen" and said the sentence to him

We definitely did not expect to walk into class one day to see her standing at the front of the class with a badge that said "sister kitchens" haha. That blew our minds for sure. Apparently, she and Brother Tan, our other teacher, even served together in Taipei, even though he told us he had never met her. After the fact it was pretty funny though, and now we can make fun of our rough lessons with her and it's great. We will have a new investigator, which will be brother Tan posing as an investigator he had on his mission, in addition to sister Kitchens continuing to pose as Peng Jyemei.

Even though we now know for sure our investigators aren't real, it still feels real in the moment, and the spirit that simple testimony brings is certainly still real, even when we can't understand half of what we're saying haha.

The language is coming along nicely, I definitely have a lot to thank the Lord for on that score.

We watched a Devotional by Elder Bednar last night called "recognizing the spirit" and it was unsurprisingly amazing. He emphasized the point that more often than not, as we live righteously the spirit guides us to where we need to go as we start out on our own with "blind faith", rather than telling us what to do as we sit and wait. He told a story about when he was serving a mission in Germany in the 70's, and elder packer's flight from their city to Berlin was cancelled. Elder Bednar and his companion ended up picking the apostle and his wife up from the airport, and taking them to the train station. Before the Packers boarded, Elder Bednar thought to pull 20 marks out and give it to Elder Packer "in case they got hungry". It wasn't until 20 years later, in a conversation with Elder Packer, that he heard the rest of the story. At the border into East Germany, the train was stopped so the guards could check passports. When they got to Elder Packers wife, they started yelling because her passport was a 3 year one that had been extended. Neither group of people spoke the other's language, and things were getting heated, when Elder Packer thought to pull the 20 marks out, put them in the passports, and hand them to the guards. They took them up to the front, brought them back, the 20 marks were gone, and the Packers were allowed to continue. (At this point in the story, Elder Bednar assured the crowd that this wasn't bribery, it was "righteous exchange" haha). When Elder Packer got to east Berlin to meet with the priesthood leaders there, he related this story to a bishop and he became really pale. He told Elder Packer that recently, the East German government had been stopping people with situations like theirs and arresting them from the trains, that the fact that that 20 marks had saved them was nothing short of a miracle with the way the East Government had been handling things lately. That was pretty mind blowing. He used that and other stories to emphasize his point that the spirit doesn't always drag you to doing what you're supposed to, but as we make good choices He will ensure that we end up being where we're supposed to and doing what we need to. I Loved that.

Well, I'll close with talking a bit about my district. My companion is Elder Anderson and he's from American Fork. He went to American Heritage school for a bit and loves wake-boarding. There's Elders Raymond and Bateman, who are from Syracuse and Alberta (Canada) Respectively. There's Elder AnderSEN (the district leader), who's from California and Elder Pilling who's also from Alberta, but about 5 hours south of Elder Bateman. The sisters are named Fenton and Phillips and they're from Hurricane and Lehi. They're all pretty cool I'm excited to talk a bit more in depth about them when I have more time.

Love you all!

Elder Ogden