Week 25- October 14, 2012

Week 25

October 14, 2012

Hey everyone!

I feel like I was just here writing my weekly letter home, time flies...

The highlight of this week was General conference (this is where the prophet and apostles of our church speak worldwide to everyone in the church.)  I've never been so excited to listen to Conference. It was the real deal. Elder Holland's talk was powerful and really profound. It was interesting to think about do we really love God and how do we show it? I feel like sometimes I’m like, yeah of course I love God, but then when you really start thinking deep about it, you realize that there are things you can do or stop doing to really show your love for God more. I loved Elder Uchtdorf’s talk about people’s common regrets in life and being happier. I loved Elder Eyring”s Sunday morning talk as well as Elder Bendars. Elder Bednar gave a similar talk to that while I was in the MTC, which I already talked about in my previous letter, so I won’t expound on it more…just that it was a great talk. You gotta love Elder Nelson’s shout out to the missionaries in his talk, "Ask the missionaries." I heard about the whole missioaryn age change thing (now the boys can go on a mission at age 18 and the girls at age 19 years old.)  That'll be good especially for the sisters because they need more sister missionaries out there. Sister missionaries are honestly way better than the elders!  Conference was also cool because our St. Lucian investigator, Benjamin came. He is close to getting baptized (he has to get married next month first), but he wasn’t sure if president Monson really is a true prophet of God. But after to going to conference he knows that he is!

This week we had a funeral in our chapel for an older member that died recently. The crazy thing was that he was the only member in his family and he said in his will that he wanted his funeral done in our chapel. So a ton of non members showed up to the funeral (90% of the people there.) Some were mad that the funeral was being held in our church because a lot of them were Buddhist.  In fact, one time when a man was speaking saying how cool it was that our church has hope for an afterlife, a non member guy shouted out "are you Buddhist or a Mormon?!" He was obviously mad that he was supporting our church’s teachings. But after the funeral, we got to talk to some of the non member people there.

Another cool thing is that we have a baptism this upcoming Thursday. It is the awesome Philippino sister named Rosemary. It is going to be at 8:30am so I don’t know who’s going to show up!

The language just keeps getting better and better. The hardest thing though is when during lessons the investigators and members start speaking Taiwanese. I have no idea what they are saying when that happens and Taiwanese is super hard to learn. Plus we're not allowed to learn it, only suppose to focus on Chinese. It’s all good though!

That’s the what’s up over here. Hope everyone learned great things from Conference.

Jia You (keep working hard!)

-Jordan Chatman

Jordan in the back.  This was at the 3rd transfer