Dear family,
Woooo it's like Christmas! I've been so excited all week to see where Jacob's going on his mission. And I finally know! I'm so so so happy for you - Richmond, Mandarin-speaking! Way to go! And I hadn't even considered the slight possibility of being your MTC teacher - how cool would that be? You just gave me 100% more motivation to study Mandarin harder. You xinxin you banfa (when there's faith there's a way)!
This week was such a miracle week. As you all know, we had a very white investigator whiteboard last time I wrote all of you. Well this week there are eight names of people with baptismal dates on there! Eight names! Incredible. That's more than we had when we erased all of the names in the first place! Heavenly Father blessed us so much. And, what's even better is that these eight weren't just "okay" people. These people wereprepared to accept the commitment to baptism. Here are a collection of some of the responses we had this week when we invited people to follow the example of Jesus Christ and be baptized:
"Yes. I really want a remission of my sins - I feel so bad when I remember my past mistakes, and I just wish those feelings could be swept away."
"Yes, I'll be baptized. I just have a question - is it alright if I meet with you every week until then?"
"Yes, I'm willing to work for this goal. I've met with the missionaries for five years and have never set a baptismal date before, but I think that my time has come for me to give it a try."
"I've been praying for some time now that God will prepare a way for me to be baptized."
...Talk about amazing, right? I know that these people are heaven-sent. I'm so grateful that Heavenly Father is letting us teach them.
There have been other miracles this week as well - although not too many people have wanted to meet during Guonian (think of how you'd feel if the missionaries knocked on your door during Thanksgiving dinner), prepared people have been put in our path and I have high hopes for them. One of them is a girl named Geoffery (yes, you read that correctly. Her mom had given her a girly name that she didn't really like so she changed it. Oh, and speaking of names, we're having lunch with a member who's name is "Dragon Star" today. Gotta love China). Another experience was one with a family! We have an enormous stack of formers in our apartment (Sister O'Brien is amazing at organizing things and organized all of the formers according to coordinates on our map we have of the area), so we've been praying about whom we should go and find again. Anyway, we were going to visit one of them and she was out of town. We had about 10 minutes before we wanted to go and make calls. I felt like we should knock the doors of the neighborhood before we left. We started at the front of the street, but then I had an inexplicable (well, I guess it's explicable - it was the Spirit) feeling that we should go to the end of the street instead. We knocked on a house's door - but it looked like nobody was home. No, I did not have anyone yell, "Nobody's home!" like they did to Daniel (although yes, that has happened before). Instead, someone came to the front. I said, "Hi, we're the missionaries," and she said, "Thanks be to the Lord!" It was very surprising. Turns out she's a Christian, but had never bothered to find a new church since she moved to Shilin 10 years ago. She said, "Wow, it's good that you came, I was actually planning on going out but I happened to still be here when you knocked." I told her that I felt like God was behind it, and she agreed with me. She and her daughter said they'd be totally willing to have us talk to her again after Guonian. All of that because we said a prayer to know where to go! Wow.
Guonian's been pretty good - nobody has forced us to eat all of their food yet, so we've left houses pleasantly full rather than feeling like we're going to explode any minute. We have high goals for this week, so please pray for us to find people to teach. We want to find four families! I guess we sort of already found one. But still, four more would be awesome. Today to celebrate I think we're going to go to the Children's Science Museum. :) Pretty much all of the museum's are closed on Mondays... except when it's a holiday! I'm actually really excited - I'm sure we'll have a lot of fun. We're going with a few members, too, so that will be wonderful.
Speaking of members, someone I went on exchanges with this week said that it seemed like I have a great relationship with the members here. That made me really happy, since I know that relationships with the church members are essential to missionary work... and I feel like I've been working hard at establishing relationships with little results. :) But when my exchange companion pointed out some specific examples, it made me realize that there has been progress here in the past three months... which is very good. And yesterday I had the privilege of seeing a less-active member whom we've been helping and her mom come to church. Last week we met with this LA (Rosie) and set up a plan for her to be worthy enough to go to the temple before I go home. She seems excited and ready to do it. Anyway, her mom is active in the church but doesn't live here so she isn't able to help her daughter come to church as much as she'd like to - she was so happy and so grateful when she talked to us yesterday. She said, "Who cares about her finishing school? Just get her worthy to go on a mission, and that's enough for me!" It was very sweet.
Unfortunately, though, there are still some members that need a lot more help - just a few weeks ago we met with an eight-year-old boy who isn't baptized yet and apparently doesn't want to be baptized. I thought that it was that he was scared of water. But no, it's because he wants to worship another god instead of Heavenly Father. Apparently when his mom was pregnant with him, she went to a Buddhist temple and prayed to a god ("Mazhu," I actually think that that water goddess that Katara pretends to be in Avatar is based off of Mazhu's story) to protect him. Well, the mom had the baby, and then I guess he probably grew up hearing stories how Mazhu was his "protector" of sorts. And now he doesn't want to get baptized because he already has Mazhu, so why would he want someone else?
...Welcome to Taiwan, everybody.
I was reading in Acts about some of the stuff that Paul comes across - a lot of it was really similar to the things that I deal with here. This week I laughed at a story where a poisonous serpent bites Paul's hand - at first, the men who see it happen assume that if Paul had a snake bite him, then he (Paul) must be very wicked and deserve punishment from the gods and that was it. But then it says that Paul was fine, and when the men saw that his hand didn't swell up and he didn't "fall down dead suddenly, they changed their minds and said that he was a god." There are a lot of people with similar superstitious beliefs here - it's kind of mind-boggling to think about. I guess I can't give the Taiwanese people a hard time, though - I'm sure that there are probably too many similarities between the story of Paul putting a man (Eutychus) to sleep by talking too long and the reactions I get from the people I teach...
Alright, everyone. It's probably time for me to wrap this up. Thank you for being the best family in the world. I'm so proud of all of you I could burst! You all are wonderful and I love you. Have a great week.
Love,
Sister Winters
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