District Goals

Elder Ogden & Elder Qiu

大家好! 

(da4jia1 hao3-Hello big family)

2 Nephi 8:15-16

This week was solid! We have taught a lot of people and saw SO MANY miracles with finding new investigators!

On Tuesday, we, as a district, set a goal for this week to meet the standard of excellence with new investigators (no the subject does not mean we are literally "district goals", although my district is REALLY awesome), which is 4 per week, and hasn't happened here in a long time despite our best efforts.  But, we knew with the Lord's help, we could do it!

And so, even though most of the companionships didn't have any preexisting setups for this week, we got to work. That day we taught our one preexisting setup, and he was super awesome, ate up our message, and was really willing to pray, read, and come to church. Then that night we visited the contact I had made at a 7-11 several weeks ago, Alvin.  [We talked with him] at his seafood restaurant, and we talked a bit about the Book of Mormon, and set up [another appointment] with him for Thursday!

Wednesday, we went knocking in the morning, which we don't usually do. No one was home, so nothing really happened (that's what happens when you're knocking on empty houses I guess), and when lunchtime came we went to a breakfast shop for hamburgers (a little different than I'm used to, but SO good). The guy and girl working there started talking to us and we ended up talking to them for about an hour including the time we ended up eating for! They said I reminded them of Mr. Bean, (doudou xiansheng, apparently dou dou also means pimple in addition to being the word for "bean" twice so that's lovely ), and every time I talked they were like, "You're so cute!"  They also called me a word I later looked up which means something along the lines of "simple and slow of speech", which was fun, and [they] asked to pinch my cheeks . It's all good though, that apparently happens to every trainee to some extent, and they were really cool people, so I laugh about it now. We were also able to set up with the guy for the next day! When we met with him, he was super interested in learning how to have his own testimony of Jesus Christ.  So, our message about the Book of Mormon, coming to personally know Jesus Christ, the truthfulness of His church, and in essence, have his questions answered just like Joseph Smith did, really struck home!

Later that day, we met with a recent convert and talked to him about going to the temple for the first time and doing family history.  It's really exciting for him! Also that day, we met with Alvin again, and drank some ginger tea (Word of Wisdom approved) with him, and taught the Restoration, which he also found very interesting and was willing to try out the Book of Mormon and prayer! That made 3 new investigators up to that point, 2 in that day alone, which has been unheard of here for a while! We later found out the other companionships had also all had 2 new investigators in one day, with miracles galore!

We had a follow-up meeting for trainers and trainees on Friday in Taipei, which was a lot of fun to see most of my MTC district.  We had some great trainings, plus we had Costco pizza which was SO good!

That night we set up another new investigator, which meant we had already hit our goal for the week as a companionship!

Sadly, come Sunday, we had missed our goal as a district by only a few people! We were all a little bummed, but one thing you learn out here is that goals are vital for continual improvement, and sometimes you don't make it as high as you'd hoped, but if you give it your all, you will always grow and stretch, which this definitely helped us do, so we're excited to get back on the horse and work together with the Lord on making more goals and more improvement!

Road in Fenglin

Part of our calling here is building up the church, which means we help the members come unto Christ even more, which helps them find people who we can teach and invite to come unto Christ too. It's so awesome how everything we do here helps us fulfill that purpose!

Part of our efforts to strengthen the church recently has been trying to get a strong mutual program started in the area for the young men and young women to have even better opportunities to have fun and strengthen their testimonies, and invite their friends too! We met with the 3 wards in our area and worked out a plan for starting that up with the missionaries helping, but ultimately giving the amazing youth leaders here more opportunities to magnify their callings. It was really cool to see a council like that in action, and it's going to be a great thing for the youth here and hopefully be a way to find more interested youth to teach!

Another interesting thing about the culture here is the variety of the food. We don't usually eat a huge variety on a daily basis because we honestly find what we like that is cheap and stick to that for most meals, but when we eat at ward parties and stuff it's gone from soup with mushrooms and squid balls (definitely stayed away from that) to fried rice (about the closest thing to American "Chinese food") to green onion pancakes to enchiladas to brownies! The vast majority of the time it's all amazing.  We had some fried sesame balls filled with a sweet paste that is really hard to describe, but was super good. America is definitely a melting pot of foods, but I've never seen such a wide range of varieties in one place like at a ward party!

(One more thing about food from another email Elder Ogden sent home this week..."This week has been great, as you have probably seen.  One thing I didn't include, is that we got fed by members and they gave us 'Mexican food', except it wasn't. It was a bun with some of that cotton candy meat stuff, then onions, mushrooms [which I hate], a wasabi honey sauce, APPLES and PINEAPPLE [again, which I hate], all together! And you know, it wasn't absolutely disgusting, I got it down without letting them know that I was grossed out, but it was easily the weirdest thing I have eaten here by far. I think they want to have us over to feed it to us again, except in a spring roll this time, so if so, pray for me ")

"Some ants were apparently chilling on my pan..."

For my spiritual thought this week, I thought I would share an insight I had in personal study. I was thinking about how the sacrament is a wonderful opportunity we have each week to renew our baptismal covenant with the Lord, to literally be cleansed of our sins and get a new chance to do even better in the next week. Then, the rest of church is a chance to re-align ourselves with the spirit and have a renewal of the promise that we will ALWAYS have the spirit to be with us! The spirit is definitely a powerful thing. I've definitely seen how when I'm testifying by the spirit, my language problems seem to melt away. My Chinese isn't perfect by any means, even then, but I'm always able to bear a simple powerful testimony of Jesus Christ smoothly and understandably, which is not super common in other settings yet; it's really cool. I know that you are all capable of doing great things beyond your abilities through the spirit too!

Mosiah 4:3 says:

    "And it came to pass that after they had spoken these words the Spirit of the Lord came upon them, and they were filled with joy, having received a remission of their sins, and having peace of conscience, because of the exceeding faith which they had in Jesus Christ who should come, according to the words which king Benjamin had spoken unto them."

I'm so thankful for the opportunity to, at least in part, do this for people, and I invite all of you to pray to have the spirit more in your life, and really sit quietly for a bit when you're studying the scriptures and enjoy the feelings of peace and clarity, and I promise you'll know what to do to become clean, conquer your challenges and weaknesses, and become more like our Father in heaven to have a taste of the happiness he's promised us if we do!

I love you all!

Elder Ogden

"A $4 American knife"

A "Random Stuff" store