ELDER HYRUM RICHARDSON WEEKLY LETTER #17

ELDER HYRUM RICHARDSON WEEKLY LETTER #17

SEPT 8, 2013

A week that was back to normal! And we had a lot of success this week!

- Last week, on Monday, us missionaries in Neihu went on an adventure to Costco. They have Costco here! It's apparently pretty recently built and it seems to be doing really well. Everybody in Neihu knows about it and they like going there. It's a very "American" store. Imagine Sam's Club in a slightly smaller space, but with two floors. And filled with lots of American food! I've been eating Einstein Bros. bagels this week; it's a little strange! It's illegal in Taiwan to have food that is labeled as "healthy," so all of foods from America have black sharpie covering up all of the "healthy" claims. 

- On Thursday, we went to a part of our area that we don't usually go to. We had a few appointments that fell through, so we decided in our next three hours we were going to find 8 new investigators and place 5 BoMs while going "contracting." "Contracting" is just contacting and then occasionally going tracting when we feel like we need to. There's also a "contracting" dance.

Anyway, our plans for what we wanted to get done were not what the Lord wanted us to get done! We find and talked to probably 8 people, but most of them were for other areas of the mission. As my mission president would say, "Score for Team Jesus!"

- We had a really great day Saturday. We met with Zhang DiXiong, who we started meeting with when I first got here. He's a really nice guy and he only talks to us in English, but his English is really good. Whenever he answers the phone, he says "Hello my friend." We had a really great lesson, and at the end he said that he thinks he's ready to be baptized! He also came to church yesterday! We're super excited for him, and we think he'll have his baptismal interview this weekend. It's been really neat to see him change from visit to visit. Something I'm learning very quickly is that conversion does not happen while the missionaries are there. It's something that is uniquely between the investigator and God, and it happens while they are reading or praying in between the lessons. We see the most growth in faith between visits when they have been reading the Book of Mormon! 

- I was thinking this week about what a bizarre thing it is that I am doing. Stopping people on the street, trying to tell them about a guy named Joseph Smith, and trying to get them to take a book that they've never seen before and read it! If I didn't know it was true, if it wasn't truly The Lord's work, I don't think I could do it! 

- We went to a big hospital in our area and gave an elderly man a priesthood blessing. It was different doing it in Chinese, and I didn't fully understand all the words that I read off the card, but I could still feel God's power administering to this man through me. It was a cool experience.

- Chinese people get their l's and r's mixed up. We Americans think they are really different, but to the Taiwanese, they are basically the same sound.

- One of the guys who regularly comes to our English class randomly had a University of Arkansas shirt on! Apparently he went there once!

- I've learned a couple of phrases in Taiwanese. It's a really strange language and is kind of similar to Chinese but also completely different. There's no adequate way to describe how this language sounds. There is no written language and I have no idea how I would write it here.

- Because we ride bikes, we blur the lines between car and pedestrian, so whenever we are on the road and switch to the crosswalk or sidewalk, we say (in our best deep transformers voice) "pedestrian mode" and then switching back say "car mode."

- We had a jackhammer in our apartment building for a few days this week.

- Because a lot of our potential investigators have the same last names here (everybody here is Lin or Chen or Li), we come up with nicknames in order to remember who they are and where we talked to them. Recently we've had Lin Buff Kid, Li Bow Tie, and Zhang Popped Collar.

That's all for this week!

Elder Richardson

田長老