Hong Kong: JUST A GREAT WEEK AS ALWAYS

March 26, 2017

Family,

Just a great week as always.

Church yesterday was awesome. I love Sundays. It was very refreshing and uplifting. Also, the Elders Quorum President gave a talk. He is a powerful speaker. Reminded me the importance of being patient. Sometimes I want instantaneous results, but forget about the 'heavenly virtue of patience' as PMG says. I am learning and was grateful for the reminder at church. Because the Elder's Quorum President was speaking, he invited a lot of LA and other non-member friends to come. So many people came. I have never seen that many people at church before. Probably 10+ new or LA people came. It was awesome. I know for at least 3 of them, they want to come back to church. I told them about the mandarin branch soon to be in Kowloon and they were excited about that. I really think once this Kowloon branch starts up, it will explode. I am so excited. Great baptismal service as well. Tons of support.

We were able to meet the wife of a recent-convert who is in Hong Kong for a month. She is christian and came to church with her husband. Her last name is Gan. We will continue to meet her and might be able to get her baptized before she heads back to mainland, where she can then find the church and continue to progress.

Personally, I am trying to make sure I follow the counsel in Ephesians 4:27about our words and language. I want to be like the man in Bruce Porters talk who never said anything negative about any person or any circumstance. When others are around me, I want them to feel buoyed up.

I love to be with the new missionaries. They are always inspiring and have great hope for the future. It's a blessing to get to spend some time with them. One of the missionaries is so small. 5 feet flat. Elder Banihit. He'll be a great missionary. Some solid missionaries in this group. When we were announcing the missionaries with their trainers, Elder Sargent announced 1 companionship wrong. Then they clapped, hugged and we looked over at President Lam with a very concerned look on his face. Then we realized what happened and made a last minute substitution. Actually, Elder Love with be with Elder Ashton not with Elder Lutkin. Whoops. I'm sure that threw them for a loop.

Every time we take new missionaries to the Government Office to pick up their ID cards, we always meet some awesome mainlanders! One guy was so happy and grateful that I would give him a Book of Mormon and was really excited to go home and read it. He was like,'really? you are giving this to me? you got to be kidding. You better keep it if it is as good you were saying it is.' 'i want you to have it so you can have some of those blessings in your life' 'wow. thanks so much.' That's the best translation I can do from mandarin. He said he'll call me up when he get a HK phone number. He just moved here from Mainland.

Have a good week!

Elder Stratford

new missionaries.