RICH MISSION MEMORIES: ELDER HYRUM RICHARDSON LETTER #62 -- JULY 28, 2014

LETTER #62 -- ELDER HYRUM RICHARDSON

JULY 28, 2014

Last week for P-Day, Wu Mama took us hiking. What we originally thought would be a pretty relaxed slow-pace hike turned out to be a three hour-long really tall hike up a mountain. Wu Mama led the whole way, out-pacing all of us missionaries. The view at the top was pretty good (pictures attached) and almost worth the four days of sore muscles that we all had afterward.

View from the top of Xiangshan. It's a pretty easy hike to here and I'm sure we'll do it when the fam comes back to Taiwan!

On Tuesday, everybody started telling us about the typhoon that was coming! We always hear about it from people on the street who tell us to go inside and be safe! But we're outside unless it gets really serious. Everybody was saying this typhoon would be really bad, even our bishop called and said he was concerned we didn't have enough food, but it ended up being not that bad. There was some good wind and rain for a few hours, but that was about it. We only stayed in an extra two hours, and then we were outside again!

This week we visited a lot of Less Active Members. We have some that we are trying to meet with more regularly and are progressing pretty well.

On Wednesday, one of the ward missionaries (Sister Trouble) gave me a Chinese name! She spent some time working on it, and I think it's pretty suitable, so I decided to just stick with this one. So now I am officially 任淳楷 (ren4 chun2 kai3).

Our investigator family disappeared for two weeks. The husband went to mainland for work and couldn't answer his phone while he was there, and then he left his phone there! So they didn't answer their phone for a while. We decided to go again to knock on their door, and they invited us in! We then got the wife's phone number so that we can keep in contact. We are just glad they are still willing to meet with us! Hopefully, they'll be able to come to church soon!

We have another awesome investigator who we met with this week. I mentioned her last week, Sister Ye. She came to church on Sunday and had a lot of members reach out to her and get to know her. We were so glad! She is going to keep progressing and hopefully get baptized at the end of August!

On Sunday after church there was a baptism for a family the sisters have been teaching. It was a mom and her two daughters. Us four missionaries put together a musical number that included the sister's singing, Elder Darger on the guitar, and me on the saxophone that I've been borrowing! It was so much fun to play saxophone again, and have a chance to share my talents! And I'm glad I didn't forget how to play!

Today we are emailing late because our investigator that loves to feed us took us to an American burger place. We think he just really loves to drop a hundred dollars or two on feeding a bunch of missionaries at once. It was a really good hamburger, something a little bit harder to find in Taiwan.

This week is transfers. I'll tell you next week if I moved or not, because I don't know yet!

That's it.

Add oil!

Elder Richardson

任淳楷長老

The view from the second peak. This one had an almost 360 degree view of Taibei.

It was pretty darn cool.

I'm like 90% sure this is one of my former investigators from Zhonghe. His name was George and he told me he was doing a lot of hiking at about the same time as that date. Pretty cool.