November 1, 2010

Hello!!
Another beautiful amazing missionary week in California!!! To start off, I believe in the last email I mentioned that we taught a man named Fang (pronounced Fawn with a g). This week we had the blessed opportunity to go back and teach him! He is quite hard to understand, one because he is old and has a thick accent, and two because he had surgery on his mouth not too long ago so it makes it really hard to understand. But we taught him about the restoration of the gospel and he told us in the middle of our lesson that he could no longer speak to us because he didnt believe in God or Jesus Christ. So we went by the spirit and asked some inspired questions to find out more of his concern and we found out that he doesn't believe because everyone that believes always say they have seen these huge miracles and amazing blessings in their lives and he has never seen any. So we taught him more about who Jesus Christ is and helped resolve the concern that he had. The spirit was so strong in the lesson and he was very excited to read the Book of Mormon he almost couldn't wait till we finished hah. As we were leaving he looked at me and said in chinese, "you speak chinese, I really like you", then he looked at Elder Kim and said "I like you but I like the chinese speaking american more". haha. After we left we realzied that we forgot to give him a specific part to read out of the Book of Mormon, so an hour later we went back to give him that part and when we went back he said he was already reading! We were teaching another lady this week and her father and mother joined us in this lesson, it is very different teaching 3 people at once because you have to make sure to include all of them and make it personal for each but the spirit was there and the lesson went very well. After the lesson the mom asked if we would like water, so we said we would love some. She came back a minute later with hot water in each cup (chinese people love drinking just plain hot water). She told us to be careful because it was very hot, so I carefully sipped the water, however Elder Kim didn't hear that she said it was hot so he grabbed the glass and took a huge gulp of water, and nearly spit the water everywhere haha. I had my first interview with the Mission President this week! It felt funny not having my interview until now, the president said he considers me a veteran out here now. This week when tracting on saturday, it was very very hard becuase there was some football game going on and everyone and their dog was watching it. Yesterday was my first Halloween in the field! We tried to be creative while tracting and at one door we said "Happy Halloween, usually people ask for treats on halloween but we have a treat for you!" it was kind of cheesy but it worked! I am learning and growing so much out here! I have found that when i place my focus on others and there concerns and how I can help them and stop worrying and thinking about myself, then I am so much happier! It gives me no time to be upset or dscouraged because I am focusing on something more important! I love this work so much!!! I love you all so very much!! I hope everything is going very well! Write me letters! ;) Zaijian!