Dear family and friends,
Dajia hao! It's been a great week, full of some wonderfully spiritual and hilarious moments. Care if I share?
This past week I celebrated my one-year anniversary in Taiwan. Wow! I feel so lucky to have been on this wonderful island for over a year. Time's flown by! Sister O'Brien was very good to me and we had a wonderful week-long celebration. Highlights included Coldstone Creamery ice cream (the only place on this island with real ice cream), receiving my last Christmas package (which I loved - the sweater is so bright and happy and the calendar brings me indescribable joy!), and eating Thai food for dinner (my all-time favorite). An added bonus for the Thai food: there were members eating at the same restaurant and they bought a delicious coconut milk-based dessert for us. YES. Thinking back on the occasion, my reaction to eating the Thai food must have been funny to see - I wouldn't call my feelings "trunky," but I would definitely identify them as a sudden realization that yes, there is extremely delicious food in the USA that won't be too bad coming back to. Of course, I guess I could just eat that food here as well, but it's quite a bit more expensive than the normal greasy-but-delicious Taiwanese food we buy here (although the Thai food is still a lot cheaper than it would be in the US - about $5. Go figure.).
On a completely different note, I had two big confidence boosts about my looks this week. One of them took place in the form in a miracle! Sister O'Brien and I were "on the rescue" and were looking for a former investigator family (we've been doing that more lately - it's given me more perspective as to how the Savior feels about us and how I should be even after I get back from my mission). Anyway, no luck. Or at least no luck as far as meeting with that family goes. So we contacted around the area for a little bit - no success. I kept feeling like we should leave, but yet we weren't really leaving. Just as we were turning around to go, I found out why. A tall girl with bleach blonde hair, braces, and sunglasses on (it was cloudy outside, by the way) yelled "WAIT!!!" and ran up to us. She was wearing high heels so by the time she reached us she was a little out of breath, haha. But anyway, she breathlessly explained that she was a college student doing fashion design ("I have a passion for fashion" were her exact words) and she needed two American models and we would be perfect. A brief image of me in a long, beautiful dress on a runway with a nametag on flashed through my mind for a brief second before I told her that we probably couldn't model for her, but that I could probably get her in touch with some more Americans who probably could (English ward). She was so grateful and said, "I've needed to find models so bad! I've been praying and praying to God for Him to help me out. I believe in Jesus, too!" She said that after her fashion show is done she would love to worship with us and maybe even go out and proselyte with us! Haha her name is Vivian and she is very cute. I hope that things work out with her. Oh! The other ego-building moment - yesterday we were meeting with one of our investigators and she raised her hand and said: "Are your eyelashes really long and curly like that? Or are they fake?" I laughingly (is that a word) explained that I wear mascara, but yes, they're real. She was so impressed/jealous/in awe. It was hilarious.
Speaking of our investigators, though, you asked about the people we're teaching and how they're progressing. To tell you the truth, we're kind of in a stagnant-but-trying-not-to-be-stagnant phase right now. We have people progressing towards baptism, but it's all pretty slow. But, we do have a miracle in the form of baptisms this month! The sisters in Neihu (north of us) are teaching a sister that actually lives here but goes there every now and then to take care of her mom. So she'll be baptized later this month on the 26th. We're so excited! Her name is Sister Liu and from the one time that I've seen her it seems like she's really great. As far as other investigators go, a lot of them have family opposition problems. Some of these people are 19 or 11 where they still need their parents' permission, but a lot of the time its when they don't needpermission (eg: they're over the age of 20 or when it's a family member like a grandma where they don't technically need their permission to be baptized). The people we're hoping for the most are a Sister Cao - she's a former who didn't show up for her baptism interview but seems happy to be contacting the church again. She's 31 and thinks that her father-in-law will oppose; Sister Xu - a cute student that we taught for the second time yesterday (she's the one who asked me about my eyelashes); and then the miracle Sister Wu, whom we haven't been able to meet with in a while because of finals but we'll be meeting with her tomorrow. I would say that the biggest problem that we've been having with our investigators is church - it's been by far the lowest it's ever been on my entire mission. Yes, people in Taipei are in general busier than people in Taidong, but still - I'm going to be trying my best to "boldly declare repentance" in that area this week since not much else has been working. Please pray for me! Oh, and please pray for Vicky, one of our investigators. She loves the Gospel but has a hard life and hasn't been doing too well lately so she needs all of the help she can get.
Last thing: this past week we got to go and see a fireside featuring Elder Kitchen, one of the elders in the first batch sent here to Taiwan more than 50 years ago. He's a temple worker missionary right now and it was so amazing to hear about his experiences. No chapels, no investigators, no copies of the Book of Mormon... and I think getting people to church is hard! It made me very grateful for the resources we have now. And it also made me grateful for the people that I get to be in contact with. Elder Kitchen said that he was happy to be back in Taiwan - "Ever since I left, I've often missed you." It's interesting because the word for "miss" and the word for "think of" is one and the same. So when he said "I've often missed you," he was also saying, "I've often thought of you." Honestly, it was hard for me not to cry at that point. I know that when I leave here, I'll leave part of my heart here in Taiwan - it'll be my turn to often miss and think of the people whom I left here, and I won't be complete until I see them again. I'm so grateful that my Father in Heaven knows me and loves me well enough to send me here and meet His precious sons and daughters in Taiwan.
I love my life! Thank you for letting me share it with you. Have a wonderful week!
Love,
Sister Winters
PS - Enjoy the pictures! A couple ones of the Taipei temple I took on Christmas Eve and then a few of me from Christmas day.
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