你好!
Well, this has truly been an amazing week. There were not a ton
of big events that happened, but there were plenty of miracles and blessings
shown through out the week as Elder Huang and I were out doing missionary work.
As to quickly answer some questions I have gotten recently, here
are the answers.
- Have there been any changes with a having a new mission
president?
No, there haven't been any changes. When we first got to meeting
President Jergensen about two weeks ago, he said all the guidelines from
President Day are still to be followed until further instructed. So, sounds
like there will be some changes, but it will probably be around Christmas when
those changes start coming out.
- How is English Class?
With location and timing, we actually do not attend the English
class here. It is about a 25 minute bike ride to the chapel, and they already
have 4 companionships that live closer to the chapel, so we have been invited
to continue with doing missionary work in our own area, which does have its
benefits because that means that Wednesday night we are still able to meet with
our investigators.
- Do we have rooms and a washer at our apartment?
Yes we do. The apartment is designed to be a four man apartment,
but there are only the two of us right now. Also for the washer, every
apartment in the mission has a washer. The real question is a working drier.
Most apartments have a drier, but most of them are broken, and being elders
that don't want to spend money, they usually don't get repaired. As for our
apartment though, we have a working drier, which is pretty nice.
- What do we do for food?
Elder Huang really likes to eat inside for Lunch, so we eat
inside for lunch. As for dinner, we recently have been trying out a whole bunch
of new places, to see what is good here. Whenever we ask people what there is
good to eat here in 新竹 (Xinzhu), they always seem to look a little puzzled and then
tell us they don't know of any really good places to eat. So, when we are
biking, we will take note of any place that looks like it could be good and
then come back some point later in the week and try it out, which has been fun.
Only hard part is that it is really testing my food characters, trying to
understand what I am ordering because some places give different foods
different names.
- What do we do for P-day?
Recently, we have gone bowling twice with the other 新竹 (Xinzhu) Elders which
has been fun, but other than that, it just depends on what the weather is like.
As for a few of the things from the week, we had exchanges with
the Zone Leaders this week, which was pretty fun. I got to go to 竹南 (Zhunan) with Elder
Dethloff, which most of the time was spent finding. It was truly interesting to
see his style of finding, which is completely different than what I am use to
doing. Which is contacting almost purely in English and then translating the
words that they don't understand. But other than contacting, we had a bunch of
service which was pretty fun, just because in 新竹 (Xinzhu) we still haven't been able to find a
service that we can do each week, so it was nice to have some set up for us to
do in 竹南 (Zhunan). We were
helping a member move and then also spent time bagging rice for elderly people
at a donation center, which was pretty fun. Also, for the really cool part, we
attended PEC. The reason it was cool was because exactly 7 months ago I was on
exchanges with the Elder Anderson, the zone leader at the time, and attended
PEC. They were all surprised to see me again to say the least.
Now for one of the miracles. We have been trying to meet with a
recent convert that went less active about a month after being baptized, and
then randomly he called us up Tuesday morning and said he wanted to meet. We
first had to call President Jergensen because he wanted to meet in 20 minutes,
which was still our study time. President Jergensen said it would be ok, and we
were off to meet with him. I was finally able to meet him which was cool and
able to share a little message with him, which was super nice. He said that the
rest of this month was pretty busy, but said that he would be willing to meet
again the beginning of next moth, which was such a big miracle.
This week, just like many other weeks, we have been spending a
lot of time finding, but this week was a little different in that it felt like
everyone we were talking to was prepared. So, to say the least, our
investigator pool really picked up this week. We are hoping that this next week
it will be able to continue and that this next week we will be able to find
even more of the people that the Lord has prepared. As for the spiritual part
about all the new investigators, they were all found because of the
"Because He Lives" initiative. We have been reminded to use the
"Because He Lives" in our finding, and this week we put an even
higher emphasis on using it. And as we did so, we were truly able to find the
prepared through the "Because He Lives" video. Also one of the other
cool things is that we have started meeting with one of our less active member's
sisters. Things just worked out this last week that his sister was home and
that we were able to share a little bit about the gospel with her and she said
she would be willing to listen and learn, which is super cool.
As for my last comment from the week, it has to do with member
missionary work. One of the coolest things while contacting was that we
actually contacted a few people that had a friend that was a member. The reason
it was so nice contacting them was that their friends were all super good examples
of being a member of the church, which helped us share the gospel with them and
invite them to meet with the missionaries. So no matter what we do as members
of the church, others are always watching. As we set a example, others will
notice it and then one day become the prepared.
Well, that was basically my week. We spent a lot of our time out
finding were able to truly see some miracles from it! Hope you all can have a
great week and thanks for all the emails and prayers!
我愛妳們,
Love you,
柯長老
Elder
Okeson
