Elder Ogden in Taipei: Happy New Year!

Note from Missionary Mom Des: Another video email this week! I am including a transcript this time. As always, thank you for your support of Elder Ogden!

Transcript of video:

"Hello everyone! Sorry, I don't have a ton of time this week, but it was a good week. We went on exchanges with the Elders in Tucheng who are the only other two people in our district, and they are zone leaders. It was fun to go with them because they are super experienced. I learned a lot from them and we had a lot of great lessons with them. It was fun to meet their friends. Their friends actually had a ton of miracles happen right before this exchange so I got to hear about them in their lesson. We had some very powerful lessons with them and it was a lot of fun.

There was one guy in particular, his name is Raymond, and he was telling us about his experience reading the Book of Mormon. He said that he had been feeling a little sick, just a little down, so he decided to try reading the Book of Mormon and praying. He was reading and just happened to be in Jacob 6 (it's actually Jacob 7) where it talks about Sherem, the anti-Christ, who comes and is using his persuasiveness with words and his extensive education to kind of persuade people to stop believing in Christ. [Sherem] tries to attack Jacob's testimony but Jacob testifies of things that he has seen and experienced and Sherem ends up..."(pause here as Elder Ogden tries to remember details of the story which he then thinks he is confusing with the story of Korihor. Lol. For details of the story of Sherem click here to read about it. If you want to learn about Korihor click here. Both great stories. :)

"Anyway, this friend said that as he was reading this, he thought, "Sherem is me! That's me! I've been doing that. I've been thinking I'm above believing in all this stuff because of my education and stuff." Then he started talking about how we (the missionaries) are super awesome, which we're really not, but we're also not dumb. He was just talking about how he was humbled by that. He felt like that was exactly what he needed to hear. He was looking for peace so in the next chapter, which is Enos 1, there's a verse where the Lord tells Enos to be at peace and he felt like the Lord was speaking to him there as well. So he just had this really cool experience reading the Book of Mormon and that led into us talking about repentance and building faith in Christ.

Raymond told us that he feels like repentance is a scary concept. The idea of repenting of all of the things he has done wrong in the past, where he's done so much, he said it feels like a giant burden upon him. We were able to share about how Christ's Atonement is infinite and if we are willing to really ask for His help and try to change, then we can change and have that burden lifted. Raymond wanted to be baptized.

As for our area, we met with our friend, Lio, who's doing awesome. He's a 13-year old boy that we found on the street that had felt ridiculed and unappreciated in his past church and he decided to leave Christianity for a while. But then he has felt even more miserable. But, he's been loving the Book of Mormon and loving church. He loved the Christmas concert last week. He's really awesome.

Then we met with our friend Tina who came to church with her neighbors who are in our ward. She told us how in the past she has come in contact with Christianity a lot. She has a more traditional Daoist background, but she's come in contact with Christianity a lot and she outlined all of the times she has come in contact with a missionary or churches. She's always been curious and has always wanted to know and understand more. She told us her first experience with Christianity was in elementary school. She had a teacher who was a very, very devout Christian and every day in class he would basically just preach to them. He would say things like, "You all have to believe in the Lord Jesus. You're all sinners and you all have to be baptized." He would write out these scriptures or something and pass them out to everyone, which is pretty over the top and also very not okay now. But, he did it and there was even one day where he just said to her, "Hey, bring some extra clothes and come with me." She asked him where they were going, and he said, "You're going to be baptized." She didn't even know what that meant and was totally confused. That was her first experience with Christianity. Luckily it didn't scare her away too much.

Throughout her life she has had a lot of experiences and most recently her husband passed away suddenly. He was totally fine and then he got sick. Within a month he was gone. That kind of left a hole in her heart. She tried every religion she had come in contact with. She tried going to the nearest Christian church to her house, she tried going to the Daoist temple to worship ancestors or Daoist Gods. She tried Buddhism and all of these different things, but never really found peace. Then she met her neighbor and her neighbor shared with her about temples and eternal families. She was very interested in that. She said, "That is what I want to know more about...temples. I'm super curious about temples."

We had a great lesson where we explained about the restoration of the authority that Jesus Christ gave to his disciples to seal in heaven what has been sealed on earth and how that was lost , but it's back again. It was a very powerful lesson. We asked her if she would want to be baptized and she said, "Of course!" That was a really great experience.

I feel like here (in Sanxia) the success we've seen hasn't really been a result of our efforts or the things that we have tried don't really work out so well. But we are just able to help a bunch of people that just pop up out of nowhere, which is pretty much how missionary work works in general. I'm pretty okay with it. :)

I hope you all have a wonderful New Year!"

-Elder Ogden