I SERIOUSLY LOVE MANDARIN. SUCH A COOL LANGUAGE.

April 9, 2017

Family,

Just a great week this week! Full of many inspiring, faith strengthening days with questions answered. And a lot of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir! Can never get enough of that...most the time. I am filled with a renewed desire to serve the Lord more faithfully, follow his promptings more exactly, and love His children more perfectly. I love General Conference. I have a stronger testimony that your faith can be strengthened by hearing the word of God.

Elder Lau is just incredible. A great servant of the Lord. 

Got to see and spend a little time with President Lam's grandkids while they were here visiting last week. They are pretty cool kids. Speak mandarin and english. Perfect, the best 2 languages in the world. I love speaking with people from the Mainland. There are not too many in Hong Kong.  More and more though. I seriously love mandarin. Such an awesome language. Anyway. They also bought us these spinny things.

While playing frisbee in the morning for exercise on the outdoor basketball courts, Elder Sargent was throwing the frisbee to the other team to start the game of Ultimate Frisbee and swooshed the frisbee in the basketball hoop from full court. Pretty awesome.

Geng JM got baptized! She is awesome. It was a miracle. She lives in Mainland and her husband who is a recent convert told us that she would be visiting for a month. We met her soon after she got here and invited them to church together. She is a christian and we talked to her about the baptism of water and the baptism of the spirit. Found out that she has only had the baptism of water and she committed to being baptized before she left home, which was in 3 weeks. We began teaching her many times each week helping here prepare. She already has a christian background, which is very unusual, but helped her learn and progress quicker. Then yesterday, she entered the waters of baptism before heading off to Mainland today. Pretty cool.

I had a good reminder this last week. We asked Sister Woo and Colombel to help us take an investigator home because they live near each other. They were nice and helped us. That night they called us and mentioned that they visited with the investigator and were planning on coming over the next day to visit her. For whatever reason, I was a little frustrated with the sisters. They were taking over the people we were teaching. I even complained to Elder Sargent that Sister Woo and Colombel were taking over our investigators. Than I soon realized how selfish my thinking was. They are not MY investigators. I thought I new this, but my frustration clearly shows that I did not. They are the LORD'S investigators. We are on the same team. After that rebuke and reminder from the spirit, I had much nicer feelings and was grateful for the sisters in helping us as we worked together to help this wonderful sister prepare for baptism and continued faithfulness in the church.

This experience came in handy later in the week as we were visiting another investigator. Li Jiu. A missionary called him and asked how to get to his house. He then explained that this elder had called and wanted to visit that night. I used the investigators phone to help give them directions. They were shocked when I started talking. They just found this number on an old sheet. Then the elder, Elder Herzog, started apologizing. Saying, "sorry about that. We didn't mean to schedule your investigator..." "Elder Herzog, he is not my investigator. He is the Lord's investigator. We are on the same team trying to help this man come closer to Christ. If he has time to meet tonight as well, please come." If I had not had the experience earlier in the week, I would of taken the apology and said, don't worry about it, we'll take care of him, you don't have to come over. But because of this experience, I had much better perspective, which led to Elder Herzog coming and visiting Li Jiu that night. He called me that night to report on what happened during the lesson. Li Jiu now has a baptismal date for the end of the month! We have been having a hard time to get him to commit and Elder Herzog was able to help him. I have a strengthened testimony of unity in doing the Lord's work. It brings miracles.

Elder Stratford

Hiking pics

Chen DX and his wife who were baptized last night!

That was President Lam's son. His family was in town and living with President and Sister Lam so we got to see them at night. Their grandkids are in the picture. They showed us these toys and after we showed interest, they went out and bought some for us a few days later. 

Chen DX, investigator heading back to Mainland soon.

lunch in between Saturday Conferences with some of my favorite elders