Week 23

Elder Ure and Elder Okeson in Miaoli

你好?

As for the question of why I didn't email home on Monday, it was not because I died.  It was because today, we got to go to the temple, so our preparation day changed to today.  We were able to go to the temple which was completely in English, so I did not need to wear head phones.  It was super fun, mainly because it had just be so long since I have been to the temple.  There is so much to learn and do, yet so little time to do it.  So for today, it really has been and will be crazy.  We left 苗栗 (Miaoli) this morning at 6:30, to get to the temple by 9 am.  We are going to the doctors for my companion, we need to email, and then catch our train by to 苗栗 (Miaoli) at 4 this afternoon.  So, we don't really have a ton of time for preparation today.  It's just one thing right after another.

Before I explain about going to the hospital, I want to do a flash back to our specialized training from a few weeks ago with President and Sister Day.  They covered a ton of stuff, but two big things that Sister Day covered was dog bites and ingrown toe nails because recently there have been a couple of Elders in the mission with those two problems.  But for today, we are not going to the doctors for a dog bite.  With all of the biking and walking we do, toe nails are apparently a big problem for a lot of the missionaries.  So, I am currently praying that I will not have to deal with any of those problems.

As for Halloween this week, I didn't see anything for it really.  Just down the street from where we live, there is a western school for primary age children, and they had Halloween type decorations, but other than that, we didn't we didn't see or do anything to do with Halloween.  Maybe next year if I am in 台北 (Taipei), I may get to see more of the Halloween type stuff.

As for me and my new companion, Elder Ure, we are doing really well.  We have scared a few people with our height, but it is usually a pretty good conversation starter.  Personally, my favorite thing to do with Elder Ure is to bike up on both sides of someone on a motorcycle, because they see us both, and they almost always start talking to us first, which is nice.  Got to love being tall.  Also, today we found out I am the third tallest in the mission and Elder Ure is the second tallest.  There is an Elder who is slightly taller than Elder Ure, which is super funny.  We feel like at some point, all the Elders who are 6 foot 5 inches or taller should all be put in the same area.  There are 4 Elders that currently fit this description, so it is possible, we just need to see if President Day will do it.  It would be a super fun apartment, that is all I can say.

As I mentioned last week, we were starting to work through calling all of the formers, but this week we have also started looking at visiting all of the members in the 苗栗 (Miaoli) ward.  We found out that there are about 700 members, and only about 70 are active, so we have a lot of people that we will able able to visit.  So some of the goals that we have been setting are having to do with visiting all of the members in the ward, which, if we are able to at least visit two a day, it will take about a year to visit them all, so there is a lot of work to be done.

A couple of the other things that we had this week were zone meeting, which was really good.  The most surprising thing though, was that President Day got the inspiration that morning that he should come to our zone meeting.  The training was on how to use Preach My Gospel and also about missionary schedule, which is what President Day talked to us about.  He talked to us about making sure to follow the schedule and also to pray for inspiration, because without inspiration,we won't be able to reach any of the goals that we have set in our areas.

As for something fun this week, English class was probably one of the highlights.  We were able to cover a lot and also help a lot of our students out.  The nice thing about our class right now is that it is pretty small.  There really aren't that many people, so we are able to do one on one time with everyone, helping them personally improve their English.  With that being said though, we are working on a bunch of new things which we feel will be able to increase the size of our English class.

As for a miracle this week, it actually came from missionaries not fully finishing a record of a previous investigator. 廖姐妹 (Sister Luo) was baptized three years ago, but the missionaries never actually said that she was baptized on the record and left her in the former pile.  So when we called her up this week thinking she was a former, we found out that she was a member and that her husband is not a member yet.  So, for the miracle, we were able to find out about a part member family that will will now be working with to help her husband see how the gospel can help him in his life.  We both were super excited when we pieced all of this together and realized what we had found.

Well, my time is about up for the week.  I love you all and am so grateful for all the emails and prayers.

我愛你們,

柯長老

Elder Okeson