Hi Everyone!
Happy Monday! This week was one of those weeks where you get to the end of it and you honestly can't remember a single thing that happened before Saturday. And Saturday was a bit of a blur too. Thankfully, with the help of photos and some extensive pondering, I was able to remember most of it.
(Translation: Good morning. Have you ever read the sixth Chronicles of Narnia book, The Silver Chair? This reminds me a bit of the cliff they start out on.)
This week we had exchanges with Sister Bateman and Sister Jackson!
Sister Bateman is my missionary granddaughter (my trainee trained her), and Sister Jackson is one of my best friends from the MTC, so we were all super excited to be back together! Some highlights of the exchange:1) I rode an elder's bike the whole time and it ate my skirt. 2) We were a little lost on our way to drop off a note to a member's house, when we randomly ran into another member who was visiting her sister who lived nearby, and she insisted on taking us there. 3) Sister Bateman and I both love reading, so we got to get caught up on all the good books we forgot existed. 4) We got fresh made avocado milk (think avocado milkshake) at a member's house. It was an awesome exchange!
Directly after our exchange, we all headed over to zone conference, our first one with President Card (wait, you might say, haven't you already had a lot of meetings with President Card? Yes, but they weren't zone conference. I'm losing track of how many first meetings we've had at this point). It was a really great conference, and the Cards brought their kids, which made it extra fun. They're such a cute family! Sister Taylor and I did a training, and it turned out pretty well! I'm so grateful for Sister Taylor. She's super enthusiastic and on the ball.
Biking back from the train station after Zone conference, our District Leader, Elder Marsh, took this picture. Perks of everyone riding a scooter in Taiwan is that you have a captive audience at every stoplight!
Last night, it was the end of a long week, we had an hour left of contacting, and to be honest, all I wanted was to go home, eat some chocolate, and go to bed. But if there's one thing I've learned from my mission, it's that circumstances can change from blah to amazing in a heartbeat, so I decided not to emotionally check out just yet, and instead to pray and get to work. We went to this park, and while we were there I suddenly felt like I wanted to talk to this guy in a hat walking past.
When we walked up to him, he turned and immediately asked, 'missionaries, right?' Usually, when someone asks this question, it's followed by a firm statement that they've already heard anything we could possibly say, they completely understand our religion, and they don't have interest. So Sister Taylor and I were a little wary as we said that yes, we were in fact missionaries. This man, however, didn't immediately shut us down, but instead started asking a bunch of rapid fire questions about whether or not Mormons believe in Christ. We opened the Book of Mormon and showed him that in fact, we 'talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophecy of Christ'. We asked if he would be interested in meeting with us and learning more about what we teach. He asked if we had time right then, and luckily we still had about 20 minutes before we had to go home. So right there, standing in the middle of a park, we taught the entire message of the Restoration of the Gospel in 20 minutes. Our new friend (Whose English name is Carrey, as in Jim Carrey), was super interested. He's a Christian himself, and he especially liked that we emphasized that we all need to find an answer for ourselves through the Holy Ghost. In another five minutes, we had invited him to pray about what we shared, set another time to continue to meet with him, and parted ways as new best friends. It's amazing what can happen when the Spirit is present in missionary work.
A few other highlights from the week:
- We helped a woman in our relief society clean out a hoarder's house.. maggots and all.
- We met a Canadian guy who is biking and couch surfing around Taiwan for a month. He says he'd be interested in meeting with missionaries when he gets back to Canada.
- We celebrated Sister Taylor's year mark with pizza, and mine had ACTUAL BLUE CHEESE on it.
- We biked through several sudden torrential rainstorms without getting too wet, thanks to the giant plastic bags with sleeves that are sold at every 7-11
That's all for this week! Love you all!
Sister Hull
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