Cold Front

Dear family and friends,

Another week, gone. Weird. It all started with going to ZTM after a big meal with the previous bishop here. Nothing like a fresh fish still staring at me. I ate half of it. Then at ZTM we had a good practice time contacting. We got to watch Elder Holland's talk from when he talked about Peter and the other apostles going back to fishing and then getting called again by the resurrected Christ to get out there and continue. I love that talk so much. I have a lot of interest in the life of Peter. Then I gave my reflection of my mission. At the final conference of missionaries before we go home, we give a 3 minute reflection of our mission. And last week was the last conference of missionaries I'll be at. Me and Elder Terry sat by each other during the meeting all nervous. And it was a lot of fun to speak and hear him speak. I'm glad we're in the same zone. We had Subway for dinner afterwards.

Wednesday was a good finding day. But we found an LA that Elder Buhler met with when he was last here. He's a nice older man. He's really nice. And I don't know why he doesn't come to church besides being really old. He lives right there and says he loves the church a lot. He'll show up ever two months or so. Then we went down to Fengjia for English proselyting. Everyone is starting to come back from the holiday break, but still not a whole lot of people.   English class was a lot of fun. We had some new people in our advanced class. We talked about holidays and somehow ended up on music right as we were about to start the spiritual share. One student, Ezekiel, asked me what my favorite hymn was. It came out of nowhere. When I told them "Nearer My God To Thee", they all wanted to learn how to sing it. So we sang it, and an amazing peace came over the room. The two new girls went very silent and one couldn't stop staring at the words. There is the Spirit when you sing hymns.

Thursday after weekly planning, we met with an LA and had dinner. It was a poorly chosen place and Elder Buhler ended up just eating 9 mozzarella sticks. But the LA is really nice and curious about missionaries. Then we met with Michael. He was a new student at English class and really wanted to learn about our church. And he's a Joseph Smith story! His parents have been taking him to Christian churches since he was little, but he's never felt the full truth of them, so he never got baptized. And now he ended up finding us and wants to know about the Book of Mormon. He asks incredible questions. I never get these kind of questions since not a whole lot of people know about Christ here. So it was a great lesson with questions being answered. He's super amazing!

Friday we went to sit with our RC at his parents pharmacy, but he wasn't there. As we were walking out, two Americans come up to us and say hi. That doesn't usually happen. One of them served in Taiwan 20 years ago! He was in Taibei though. They were here selling potatoes. They have an international business with all the Asian countries. It was cool to talk to them. Then we found another LA that works at another pharmacy. He's really nice and funny. He wants to come back to church, but really wants to help his family by making money. The common enemy here. He's going to try to schedule himself off on Sunday mornings though!

Saturday we had a good ward correlation with the bishop. It's so nice to have him there. Then we had a lesson with Wang dixiong. We've been working with him ever since I got here and he's now working towards getting the Priesthood! I'm really excited for him. Then we bussed up to Longjing and walked the streets looking for some formers and less actives. We had a bit of success finding them, but not a lot of interest still. It got cold again.

Sunday was raining pretty hard. But there was still a good turnout at church for both wards. In the afternoon we went to visit the Sisters' RC's family. She's a little 8 year old girl that was taken to church by her parents until she could get baptized. They themselves never got baptized, but they let her. It was really interesting seeing how much the parents knew about the church, but didn't want to join. The dad was teaching his daughter about the significance of the Sacrament. And their younger daughter has to breathe through a tube in her throat. They're a very humble family. I loved getting to meet them.    Then we had a full ward FHE. There was dinner and a spiritual share on the Holy Ghost and eternal families. Then there was a guessing game. It was impossible. They would use weird descriptions to describe a character. And people were guessing them left and right. All us missionaries decided that is the game to really make you feel like a failure after being here for 2 years. Elder Christensen and I have been here for 2 and are pretty fluent and still had no idea how they were getting that. It was so deep. But it was really funny. I did get one riddle. Everyone was shocked.

And that was my week. It was a good week. I'm really excited for this coming week! There's a lot of fun things coming up! I love this area so much! Until next week!

 

Love, Elder Anthony Kai Buckwalter