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| The one and only picture for this week. Someone is keeping himself very busy and feeling the time crunch with only 15 days left until he leaves for Taiwan where he needs to be able to communicate in Mandarin. :) |
你们好亲爱的朋友和家庭！(Hello dear friends and family!)
So this wasn't as packed as previous weeks have been, but it's still been great.
We got to hear President Nelson speak on Tuesday which was fantastic! He talked about the Book of Mormon and it's converting power and how because of temple work generations past and generations to come will be so grateful for all of us missionaries and for everyone who performs service in the temple and it was really cool to look at the wonderful work of this gospel with that eternal perspective!
We're singing some songs with the Nashville Tribute Band for Thanksgiving apparently, so that's cool, people were FREAKING out when the director played the recording and we heard electric guitar. It was so funny. We are also for sure going to have a GA so that'll be cool, plus we're doing a giant service project, so it'll be an exciting day.
I've been reading the war chapters in Alma this week and loving it, you guys should definitely check them out and look at them through the lens of our battle with temptations, self-doubt, and Satan. There's SO much good stuff in there, and John Bytheway does a good analysis in Righteous Warriors.
We taught our new (actually real) TRC investigator this week. His name is Daniel Li and he goes to BYU and is studying special education. He is from California, but his dad is from Taiwan and lives there now. His grandparents moved from Taiwan to Sandy for their retirement (don't ask me why I have no clue haha) and so he lives there while he's going to school. He also likes Harry Potter (we were so proud when we figured out how to ask that in Chinese!). He's a super cool guy but we were kind of frustrated at the beginning because he wasn't really participating in the lessons and our Chinese isn't really good enough to make the lessons exciting on their own, so he was even more bored (plus I'm pretty sure he's been taught the same stuff over and over again). Then one day we felt impressed to talk about the Atonement because we had found out he's Christian, so we decided to show him how the Book of Mormon increases our understanding of that monumental event. We ended up sharing his favorite scripture from the Bible, and he ended up sharing a personal experience with prayer and his desire to draw closer to God, and got pretty emotional when he said that we were helping him do that. Then he started sharing a bunch of Book of Mormon scriptures he had really liked as he decided to read it, and we just sat there speechless (because we were shocked and couldn't think of responses in Chinese fast enough haha). We invited him to read about the Savior's visit to the Americas and closed with a prayer. I don't know what happened, other than the Spirit obviously worked on him as he decided to read. That definitely wasn't OUR convincing power, I can barely teach this stuff in English. It really showed me what missionary work is all about, and I love it.
I just want to close with my testimony that this work is true. I know Jesus Christ suffered incomprehensible pain for all of us, one-by-one, so that we could be forgiven for our mistakes and have strength and power to overcome our shortcomings and afflictions, both self-afflicted and undeserved. He has called me, unworthy though I am, to declare that wonderful news to the people of Taiwan, in their own tongue, and for that opportunity I'm so grateful and I'm SO excited.
我爱你们都！(I love you all)
武长老
Elder Ogden
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