Taiwan Taipei Mission: April 2018

This week I don't have too much to update on since it's been what...Four days?

Lucia got baptized! It was super smooth and she invited a lot of family members from 竹東 to come! She ate with us at 6 o'clock about an hour before her baptism. She was super excited every time we said a ward member was coming. It was a nice evening where she was baptized by the bishop, welcomed by the ward, and sharing her testimony on Christ! She got confirmed the next day and it was awesome!

We also had this amazing new investigator 彭小姐. I had seen her outside a 7/11 on exchanges and she was waiting for her taxi to arrive and I had speedily gave her a church tract cause she had to go. A couple days later we go to a different seven to meet this 同學 who ends up being half an hour late so we had decided to do language study. Out of the corner of my eye this lady comes up and waves to us and is like you are here? I remember you! I am confused out of my mind cause I'm like uh.....We say hi to a lot of people....But I look at her nails and I'm like

I REMEMBER then she's like I still have the tract you gave me as she opens her bag and takes out the church tract. We met with her right then and shared a bit about our church and set her up for the next day! We met with her Saturday and shared more about the restoration, she ended up coming to church the next day for all three hours and was like my son was wondering why I decided now to look at Christian churches and she was like I had to since it was fate that I met you twice. She met a super awesome member who has a son the same age as hers and they really hit it off!

We met with 冰 and her friend, her friend is actually from Mexico! It was super awesome because we shared about heavenly father and the restoration, the friend was super touched because she said she hasn't had the chance to go to church or talk to god in a while so it was refreshing and nice to talk about Him.

We were thinking with all these new people we were teaching that all of them have the same question. Who heavenly father is, now they all come from different religious backgrounds and different understandings of who He is. But it helped me to really understand that God is our loving Heavenly Father, He is an all knowing and all loving God. He is also unchanging, he loves us just as much as He loved the people thousands of years ago. He still talks to His children, and yes it's like communication because we can talk to Him and He can answer us back. Maybe not a form of communication as if I were talking to my companion but it's just as real when I pray to Him and He answers me through the scriptures.

Nonspiritual thoughts:

We had a cockroach by our dryer. I thought it was dead cause it was chilling on its back but as I got closer it started flailing around and I was like Noooope so my companion smashed it hahaha haha.

趙姐妹

Sister Tiffany Chao

Taiwan Taipei Mission

4/F, #24, Lane 183

Jin Hua Street

Da-an, Taipei 106

Taiwan

Where is time going?? Wow this last transfer is flying by and I'm only slightly freaking out.

This week was super long cause pday wasn't on Monday but we saw some awesome awesome miracles!

So one of my RCs in 汐止 husband got baptized! THEIR WHOLE FAMILY ARE NOW MEMBERS! It was so sweet to see the picture she sent and how she is grateful for the gospel and how it's helped her family so much!

This past week we met with Lucia who is doing absolutely amazing! She's so prepared! We invited her to the FHEs our ward holds and in one of the spiritual shares the person conducting it went around asking everyone what makes them happy. Lucia simply answered when I think about Jesus Christ I am super happy. When I don't think about him I notice a difference, I notice I'm not as close as before. Me:

. We then met with her later that week and finished all of the commandments and reviewed the interview questions. After reviewing the interview questions she said she felt not as nervous and was super excited! We then invited her to start posting in this scripture line group we have and she was super excited to be posting every Monday hahaha. We had her baptismal interview on Sunday and she passed! She was super happy and we told her to start inviting everyone she knew! (We followed up and she's invited her whole family to attend!) She then came later that night to an fhe and the family that was holding was like ok we will make time to go and she was ecstatic! We asked her yesterday what was the best part of her day and she said that she finished the Bible! SHE IS LITERALLY SO GOLDEN AND WE DIDNT DO ANYTHING. The more I'm around her I realize how much I need to improve! She is constantly looking for ways to come closer to Christ, ways to develop her testimony, was to become better. It's inspiring to see someone who is so devoted into coming to know Christ and to see her become more converted every time we meet is wow. We are super excited for her! We will be having her baptism this Saturday!

With Linda we had a real good sit down lesson with her. We basically described her faith had been decreasing every time she doesn't read or pray. We can only help her progress so much every time we meet with her, but if she is not doing the stuff at home then she has no way of improving. The spiritual nourishment provided by meeting with us is only sufficient to a point, without individually doing prayer and reading the scriptures there is No spiritual progression. She understood why she wasn't improving and said that she is more committed to reading and praying now!

This week we were really trying to work with the ward and to work especially with the leaders to start the new "ministering" this past Tuesday we went to meet our relief society president and talk about what we could do to help. Something that helped us was we shared the two different experiences of two sets of missionaries. One had some success by just going trying to visit all these LA people on a list and one had a lot of success by working with the members to figure out what LA members they know. We encouraged her by helping her understand the magnitude of her calling, that she could receive revelation for the sisters in our ward. We then invited her to say small prayer right then and there about who she knew that we could go with her to visit . As we earnestly seeked for the guidance of the holy ghost we were able to figure out some names and emphasize the importance of having them develop a relationship with the ward members instead of just with the missionaries. It was amazing to see how willing she was to help us figure out names when we helped her realize how important her calling was and how we just wanted to help! Because of the spiritual experience we had in that short visit, she said she was willing to start telling the sisters in relief society this is what us missionaries want to start doing with them!

We also had some amazing miracles with finding people this week! We had this couple that we had been trying to meet with for the past two weeks and they finally reset back up! We had previously just met them through the phone but this time we were able to go to their house and meet with them! They actually already have a Christian background so it was super cool to share the restoration with them!

Last week I don't know if I told you about Judy and her husband. So my companion and I are biking home and we stop at a light and there's this lady outside a coffee shop just taking a smoke break. We say a quick hello and she starts talking about how she wants to take her son to a church! She was supposed to come last last Sunday but something came up and she couldn't. But this past sunday she came with her husband and son all the way to 竹北 for stake conference! She had told us two nights before what she wanted, she wanted to find a church she could 加入 (join) and that was her expectation, to see if this is what she wanted. She had an awesome experience at church cause the speakers are of all types, young, old, male, female.

Asking referrals from everyone is so awesome! This past week we contacted this guy sitting on his motor scooter and we were about to invite him to meet with us when he said oh I gotta go my girlfriend is here and we are going to go see a movie and so we ask if he can meet with us later and he said yeah okay. We then remembered to ask referrals from everyone! So we asked, hey! Would your girlfriend be interested? Can you invite her too to come? And he was like....Ok I will make sure she comes too!

We then had an awesome contact later on the street with someone who actually shares the same last name 趙 and we shared about families and invited her to meet with us tomorrow! She then was like can I invite my friend to meet too and we are like ummmm OF COURSE.

Earlier this week we also contacted this girl on her motor scooter and had shared about the restoration, we had invited her to meet with us and then we also invited her to ask her friend that she had mentioned if they wanted to meet with us too!

Nonspiritual thoughts:

So we got locked out of our apartment two days ago. We had lost our keys (turns out they were inside the church) and we had gone to our 管理員 (our security guard?? He works at the front desk of the building ) to ask for help. He's like ok I'll call someone and so he calls a locksmith and the locksmith is like yeah that'll be 2000 kuai (64 American dollars) and we are like woah woah woah that's expensive. Our district leader gives us a number to a different locksmith he knew of and we call the number....turns out he isn't a locksmith anymore lol. So we go to this other locksmith that is near our apartment and he's like sorry I have to get up at 4 tomorrow and my a/c is getting fixed right now so 沒辦法 (there's no way) here I am looking at this man like

HOW CAN YOU LET TWO 20 YEAR OLD GIRLS SIT ON THE STREET CAUSE THEY CAN'T GET INTO THEIR APARTMENT. We said a quick prayer asking what we could do and then about two minutes later the elders call us back saying are these your keys? (Cause they have extra sets of keys in their apartment) and they were! So they road down to our apartment and 20 minutes later we got into our house!

We played jenga at a members house (the fhe I mentioned that Lucia went to) and I swear that game made me feel like I was giving birth (ok over exaggeration cause I don't know what that feels like) but I WAS SO TENSE FLIP THOSE GAMES MAKE ME WANT TO DIE CAUSE I HATE LOSING BUT I AM UNLUCKY BUT THIS TIME I DID NOT LOSE SO HA.

We met Scooby doo! It was this huge dog that was on the side of the road with its owner and we stopped and contacted them and got to pet the dog! The funniest thing is since it's so big all these small normal Taiwanese dogs were running around and sniffing him and Scooby doo just squated to pee and accidentally peed on one of the smaller dogs!! The owner was like omg is he peeing on the other dog?!

So we are in a family mart doing companion study and this man comes up to us and says do you speak English and we are like yeah? So he pulls a chair next to us and is like okay I have a question then. So we are like....Oh ok and then he's like if you saw someone stealing would you tell the workers? And so we are like well of course. And then he was like well because you stole my heart. At that point my companion and I are just

needless to say it was a referral for the elders.....In 香山 (Hsiang Shan).

I went on exchanges this past week with the 苗栗miaoli and 竹北zhubei sisters. sister Jensen and I decided to go to this family mart for language study but as we are studying we notice all these cockroaches outside. Like I'm talking a lot of cockroaches. They are a bit more wonky than usual cause they are kind of running in circles and up walls and their hind legs aren't working as well. This lady then screams cause one of them had gotten into the family mart and so the worker had to kill it.We then see these people walking around with a broom and a bucket sweeping up these dead cockroaches. This old man stomps on one of the cockroaches sweeps it into his dust pan, notices it's not all the way dead, smashes it again with the heel of his foot and then dumps it in the bucket. Turns out they are spraying this poison stuff into the gutters and it causes the cockroaches to come up and die. So we exit the family mart and there are tons of cockroaches and sister Jensen goes to take her bike to run over some of them. She then decided with one of them she wanted to nudge it with her foot cause if the cockroach is touched it starts flailing it's legs cause it's on its back. She nudges it but it like causes the cockroach to get up and latch onto her shoe, so she makes eye contact with this cockroach and starts freaking out and kicks her leg over and the cockroach goes flying past her skirt and hit a nearby door.

We are going to the temple today!