....Yeah, that was just a High School Musical reference. :) Sorry - I'm out of ideas for clever titles this week.
Family! Friends! It's been an awesome week here in the Promised Land! Which is good in and of itself, but it's even better because it means it was a great last week for Sister Rosander. She's leaving this morning - it's really surreal to think about. She's been awesome and has been 100% focused - I hope I can be like that when I get to that point.
...But I'm not at that point yet! And I'm sure you want to know what's happening next transfer (and if you don't care what's happening, then I guess you can skip this part?). I will be.... co-senior companion in Taidong next transfer. And coordinating sister (I'm in charge of taking care of the sisters in the zone and of setting up/going on exchanges with them). I'm also now the one in the district who has been here the longest (aka: "the one who should know the area the best"). Yikes! Let's just say that I've been saying: "Whom the Lord calls, the Lord qualifies" to myself over and over again for the past two days. :) BUT, I know that this next transfer is also probably going to be the best one I've ever had. Why? 1) I'm really going to have to depend on Heavenly Father's help, maybe more than I ever have. 2) My new co-senior companion is none other than Sister Tiffany Burton from Florida, one of my best friends from the MTC! She's so excited, I'm so excited, and even though neither of us can read Chinese and we're the same "age" on the mission (really young), we know that we're going to have an amazing time. 3) One of my friends from college, Elder Michael Slawson, will be moving into the area too. We were friends in my freshman year (he started school when he was 16 and had to wait three whole years to go on a mission) and I completely forgot that we were in the same mission, so it'll be really fun to see him here in the "deeeeeeep south". 4) For those of you who didn't know, we're getting a new mission president this week, someone from the South! I have no idea when he'll make his way down here, but I'm sure I'll find out soon. I'm excited to see his ideas and methods with helping this mission become even better. 5) I set a bunch of new goals to make me work even harder and be even better (hopefully), so I'm excited about those.
Well, there goes my big news for the week (so those of you who skipped that last part, you actually might want to go back and read it). Oh, wait! There was sort of a typhoon here last week. That is, everyone thought it was coming, but it ended up hitting the west coast instead. But the people from our mission headquarters called us and told us to prepare three days of food and everything. Not to mention every single person that we talked to on the street or called on the phone talked about how a typhoon was coming and advised us to be careful. I have to admit that we were all pretty excited to see what a typhoon would be like, so we were all a little disappointed when it didn't come. Oh, and this last Saturday was the Dragon Boat Festival. But I didn't go, since we had lessons that whole day. :) It's fine, it's just some rowboat competitions - I think I'll live. And I sure did get to celebrate it with food - in order to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival, the Taiwanese make zhongzis, these steamed rice dumplings with stuff like eggs and meat and mushrooms in them. They're really good. And we had them like 5 times this week by members, with an extra 8 or so people who gave us free ones.
Let's see, other traditions... I wanted to write a little this week about "bai-bai," or worshipping ancestors. That's what everyone does here. It was really surprising to come here and to see that something like that is a common practice, when you don't hear of anyone doing that in the states. Anyway, there are a lot of different methods of doing it, but this week I'll only mention a couple. One of them is burning this incense filled paper that counts as money for the dead. They'll strip it off in chunks and then burn it in this little stove in front of their houses so that their ancestors (I'm assuming) will have money on the other side. Another one of them is burning incense and then offering fruit on this altar to the ancestor. There's controversy in Christian churches whether or not you can eat the fruit on the altar, etc... For more information, see the writings of Paul in the New Testament. All that stuff is reality here. :) But anyway, it's a little awkward when you contact someone at their house and you ask them to come to church and then they say, "Oh, sorry, but I'm actually sacrificing some fruit on an altar to give my ancestors right now." People typically bai-bai more at the beginning of the month and also at holidays (Dragon Boat Festival), so we've run into that a lot lately. :)
Spiritual thought for the week - I've been thinking about faith a lot lately. Here in the Church we'll say that faith is the first principle of the Gospel. Why? Because faith is required in order for us to do anything else. Last week I shared Helaman 14:8 with one of our investigators, which flat-out says if you have faith, you'll receive eternal life. That's a huge promise! Why doesn't it say anything else about baptism or repentance in that scripture? Because when we have faith, we'll believe in God, and we'll act on that belief - we'll be willing to repent, to be baptized, to go to the temple... Basically we'll be willing to do anything that's required of us in order to make it back to God's presence. So, as aforementioned, I'm a little nervous about the responsibilities/expectations of next transfer. But I also know that I need to have faith - yeah, I can't read very many characters and still might not know exactly what people are talking about all of the time, but God can! So if I have faith in Him, I'll be okay. Because my belief in Him from my faith will help support me, and the actions from my faith will help me learn Chinese, understand Chinese, speak Chinese, and do whatever it takes to help my investigators.
...That being said, I could use all of your faith too, so please keep praying for me and my investigators. :)
That's it for today! Have an amazing week, everyone - I'm planning on doing the same.
Love,
Sister Winters
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