May, 7, 2017
Family,
Elder Lau is off speaking Cantonese in Shum Shui Po with Elder Hansen and I will be with Elder Garcia! He was previously with Elder Woolley. He is great. I think he was probably shocked more than anyone else coming to Hong Kong speaking Mandarin instead of his Spanish. He was baptized as a convert and came to Hong Kong just over a year later to serve as a missionary. He is the only member of his family. He is a humble and diligent missionary. I am really looking forward to the next 6 weeks working with him.
We are excited to see what happens with the Kowloon Mandarin Area. We have had a lot of miracles this past week and are excited to meet a lot of new faces this week with a lot of potential. We have also felt to drop some of the people we are teaching due to lack of keeping commitments and lack of desire. We are always trying to see how we can use our time most effectively. One of those miracles happened when we were picking up the ID's for the new missionaries. Every time we go, we find some amazing people. 1 was a mandarin guy we are meeting this week who seemed quite interested. Elder Vowels, a brand new missionary, started the conversation and got his number and information. Let's go Elder Vowels! In Cantonese too, well at least for a little bit till he realized the guy didn't speak Cantonese because he was from Mainland and the only language they had the same was english, which the mainland guy new a little bit of. Either way pretty good. Also, I was calling through some potential investigators Saturday night and inviting some to come to church on Sunday to witness Tippi's confirmation and a sister actually came! Crazy. She has a lot of potential too. Also a former investigator that I did not call showed up to church on his own. That is really incredible. That never happens.
I have a history of burning things and this week was not too good. I put some cookies in the microwave for 5 min, planning to take them out after a few seconds, but forgot until smoke started coming out of the microwave. It was a lot of smoke and some very black cookies. We opened the microwave and smoke just started pouring out of the microwave filling the whole room. It stunk for a few days. I'm surprised President or Sister Lam didn't comment on it. I didn't eat them.
Pretty busy week this week with transfers and Mission Leadership Council, but good. Mission Leadership Council was great. I learned a lot, but one thing that stuck out was when President pointed out the 'carefully considered' part of setting goals in Chapter 8. Elder Garcia and I are trying to follow this council so we don't make any rash decision and crazy goals, but that they are carefully set and what the Lord would have us focus on this transfer. It's going to be good. A lot of other good thoughts on sincere prayer especially. Preach My Gospel reminds us that "No one can know of spiritual truths without prayer."
A few cool tender mercies this week. I had the thought last week to take a few paragraphs from General Conference and anonymously put them in an envelope and put them in the mailbox for some missionaries. I didn't expect to hear anything about it. Then a few weeks later in Conference Calls a sister, no idea that I was the one who gave her the letter, made a comment exactly commenting on the things I put in the letter and how that is something she has been trying to work on personally and as a companionship. It was pretty cool experience.
Have a good week!
Elder Josh Stratford (施祖華長老）
No comments:
Post a Comment