November 28, 2011

Hello everyone!!

This week has been a really good week! This week we have been discussing a lot of plans of what is going to happen to all of the Asian programs within the mission. We have been discussing about maybe having the borders of our mission be opened so we could go a little further because our Chinese branch is the only branch that is close to those Chinese people for a very long way. We have to write a letter to the presidency of the seventy, so we have been working hard on how we will explain everything. This week our old Branch mission leader moved to Virginia :(, he is one of my favorite people ever! Before he left he treated me and my companion to dinner, we will definitely miss him in the Branch.

Thanksgiving was great! I was really scared because this year an actual Chinese family had signed up to feed us on thanksgiving (last year it was with our American Branch President) so we didn't know what kind of food to expect, but it turns out all of it was normal thanksgiving American style!! They told us that this year they tried their best to help us feel like we were at home for thanksgiving....it just wasn't Elder Kim's normal thanksgiving dinner ha ha. There was a lot of food and I was extremely full! So you don't have to worry mom, I was definitely fed.

I got to go on an exchange with my companion from the MTC Elder Mensink! It was an awesome exchange and we saw a lot of cool miracles happen that day. BUT i don't think anything tops what happened this Sunday!!! This Sunday we were able to teach a friend of one of our Branch Members. We taught her friend and her entire family and the are extremely interested!! We finally found a family!! 5 members of the family baptismal age! Elder Bray and I have been praying for a miracle and working really hard. I feel this just may be that miracle that we have been working for and it seems to have just landed in our lap out of nowhere. I love how the Lord works...you just never know.

Everything else is going really well! I hope everything is going well for all of you! I love you all! I would love to hear from you and I will do my best to get back to you as fast as I can! Until next week!

November 21, 2011

Hello Everyone!!

So this week was pretty awesome!!! There have been some massive changes as well! We have been working together with the other Asian speaking missionaries in our mission and we are going to try and vamp up our English classes that we teach every week. SO we are going to call the Taiwan missions and the Oakland California mission to get their English class materials from them because they all have really well organized English classes. So this week Elder Bray and I went to the mission home to meet with our Mission President so that we could call the other missions and work out the logistics with him. As we were doing that President Bowen leaned over and said "O by the way elders, you and Elder Bray are now zone leaders of a new zone. That is in effect starting now." We thought he was kidding but he wasn't! I am zone leader again, this time with Elder Bray, and we are the zone leaders over the 'Foreign Mission' zone. That is what they chose to call it. It includes all the Korean speaking elders and the Vietnamese speaking elders, all the Chinese and the two Samoan speaking sisters. We have been running around like crazy just trying to get everything set up and organized, it is crazy being a zone leader again, there is always a ton of things to do but I love it.

This week Elder Bray and I taught two of our investigators Mr. and Mrs. Wu. They are from Taiwan and they are the funniest older couple in the world. Well at the end of the lesson Elder Bray and I asked them to say the prayer and the husband volunteered first, so he started praying. This what he said in the middle of his prayer "ganxie Jidu Yesu zhu a, Yesu zhu a, zhu, tian shang de zhu, zhu, tian zhu jiao." Hahaha, ok that is in Chinese (pinyin) but I will translate it into English. He said "Thank you Christ Jesus Lord, Jesus Lord, Lord, Lord in heaven, Lord, Catholic church." Haha it is good to note that they are pretty new to Christianity so he really didn't know what he was saying, but we told him afterward and he was laughing pretty hard. Elder Bray and I looked at each other after we heard him say thank you to the Catholic Church in his prayer, it was soooo funny. Every time we go to their house they make sure to feed us, even when we say we are very full and we just ate she will go to the kitchen and cut some fruit for us, make us a soybean drink and give us some Chinese desert to top it off! That is how a lot of traditional Chinese people are, you cannot and will not leave their house until you are either full or about to explode haha.

This week has been great, there is so much to share but I will catch everyone up next week! I love you all! Until next week!

November 14, 2011

Hello everyone!!

This past week has been such an amazing week! My companion and I have been studying the language very very hard. My companion Elder Bray has been such a great teacher. His Chinese is absolutely phenomenal, and every day we use an hour where he will teach me Chinese and help me learn at a faster rate. Within a 1 hour time limit I learn 30 new characters (so i will be able to read them an know the meanings), then I memorize 20 new words, then I learn a new teaching principle and practice teaching it. Sometimes it feels like my head is about to explode afterward but it has been helping so much! I have seen a huge improvement within just the past two weeks! Our district is now starting to settle in and adjust to the new boundaries, and the work is still going strong. This week between the two companionship's we set a new record of number of investigators that came to church. We had 12 investigators come! 2 of them were the other companionship's investigators and 9 of them were mine and elder Bray's companionship!!! It was pretty intense making sure everyone was taken care of and to make sure we had lessons scheduled before they all left.

This week we had a special meeting with our mission president, he had all of the Asian speaking missionaries go to the mission home and we discussed each language program and helped him to understand more of the background and the best ways to go about the work for those areas. We had to create a plan for the next 5 years, on how we can maintain 5 Chinese speaking elders within the mission at all times....it took a lot of work to figure out when misisonaries would leave and when they need to be replaced and when we could order new ones....it took quite a while, but it looks like we have it all figured out now. The thing that shocked me is most of that plan didn't even affect me at all because I will be gone before it starts taking place...crazy....more like....scary.

Anyway, this week we taught two new investigators that we knocked into on Halloween night. It was such great lesson and the wife wanted to go to church! And she did! but after the lesson we found out that she was actually good friends with a member in our branch! Her husband had to be one of my favorite people I have met on my mission, but his problem is just the fact of how busy he is. He is a nurse and is working pretty much all day long every day. We are planning to set up a time where we can teach him again as well. Elder Bray and I have been working really hard and it seems that the branch loves the foreigner companionship (it is what they call it, even though we aren't the foreigners here ;). We have about 2 baptismal dates set right now with two investigators and we are helping them to reach the goal they have set! We are excited! Elder Bray and I have been thinking of new ideas that we can use to help investigators progress and to gain new investigators. We recently had an idea to bring Elder Bray's ukulele to a dinner and then for the message we shared Elder Bray played the ukulele and I sang "I believe in Christ" in Chinese (we made our own arrangement of the song) they absolutely loved it, so later that night did the same thing at one of our investigators house and they loved it :), after we had a really great lesson. I am loving it down here, and I am so happy I was able to come back to the Chinese branch and work with the Chinese people again. I love you all!!! I would love to hear from you! Until next week!

November 7, 2011

Hello Everyone!!

This week has been one of the best weeks of my entire mission! I am so excited for this transfer! My companion Elder Bray is probably one of my most favorite companions so far! He and I have such similar personalities and the same humour! It is also a very different experience just being in a companionship of two white guys speaking Chinese! The Chinese people freak out every time we talk to them! Elder Bray has amazing Chinese! He served in Taiwan for about 5 months but had to get surgery so he was re-assigned here after he recovered. I am learning a lot from him and we have already been seeing a lot of success just in this first week of the transfer! Last night we taught one of our investigators Yang Jiemei. A year ago I taught her all of the lessons and she was interviewed for baptism and was completely ready and good to go, but then an hour before the baptism, she called us and said she needed to cancel it, then from then on she kind of fell off the map. But recently she has been coming to church again and last night we had one of the most amazing lessons with her and she has set a new baptismal goal for this month!! We are so excited and will just continue to help her prepare! The Chinese is getting better, it has been a long process. It has really taught me to have a lot and lot of patience, because studying Chinese in California is definitely not the easiest thing in the world, in fact it isn't easy at all. BUT I have seen such a big improvement and I know it is because the Lord has chosen me to speak this language for a reason and I am going to use all the diligence I have to learn it.

This week we did a lot of sorting. We had to take the original area book for the Chinese branch and split in half so that we have all the names of the people of who are in each of our areas. It is almost finished! This week was the first time we have ever been able to have one of our District Meetings all in Chinese, and since I'm District Leader I was the one who taught it! It was pretty intense preparing for that but it went really well! This week there was a baptism in our branch! The baptism of our investigator named Jason. Jason is one of my favorite investigators that I have taught on my mission! He is from mainland china, and he already has such a strong testimony that this church is true. I can't wait for all the other miracles that are coming! It has really been such a huge blessing to come out on a mission because I have learned so much and have grown in so many ways that I never could have if i didn't go on a mission. It is the greatest! I love you all! Until next week!