Week 28 -November 5, 2012

November 5, 2012

Week 28

Happy late Halloween from Taipei (although it’s not celebrated here),

This week I and my companion did a lot of tracting. Our mission president wants us to find some more families to teach so we went tracting. What tracting basically is, is that you go from door to door looking for someone who is interested in hearing you. In Taipei there are only apartments so you can’t knock door to door.  Instead outside of the apartments they have a big box with every apartment’s doorbell and a speaker. So you ring the doorbell and then they pick up by speaking and you try to convince them through the speaker to set aside 5 minutes to here a message from you. Tracting doesn’t produce a ton of success here. But every now and then you can find someone willing to speak with you for a few minutes. We probably rang around 100 doorbells this week and only got about 5 people to talk with us.  An older man got mad that we were tracting and threaten to call the cops on us if we didn’t leave. But tracting isn’t illegal or anything bad, so we were like cool go ahead and call. Of course he didn’t and just walked away.  Then right after that a family let us up to their apartment to talk with them, but they ended up rejecting us.

Oh yeah another story (sad one)...one of our great investigators named Benjamin from St. Lucia island was scheduled to be baptized next month. This man was doing awesome and really making some progress. But recently he stopped answering our calls. So we went to his apartment to visit him. He lives in a room on the roof of an apartment building and outside of the door to get into his room is another door with a crack in the top. We came up to that door and knocked. From the crack, I could see him in his room run away into a different room and try to hide. He never came out and answered the door and acted like he wasn’t home. I don’t know if he knew it was us at his house but he has pretty much fallen off of the map! He’s getting married soon though, so maybe he's just stressed with that or something.

I've been thinking a lot this week about revelation and what we can do to receive revelation in our own lives. This is so important for our investigators because if they don’t receive personal revelation, they can never really know if our church is true or not. D&C is filled with scriptures about principles pertaining to how revelation works. I like the scripture in D&C 8:2 that talks about receiving the Holy Ghost through our feelings and thoughts. It says-“Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart.” This is a hard thing to do because we are constantly thinking and feeling within ourselves. A general authority in the MTC compared this to having a constant stream of thoughts and feelings in our daily lives and every now and then God will drop in a tiny pebble of revelation. We have to be sure that we are prepared and not pre-occupied so that we can discern this revelation. I know this Church is true! God lives! Jesus is our Redeemer! Through faith, repentance, baptism, the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end we can utilize his Atonement fully into our lives!

Peace!

-Jordan Chatman

Jordan and his trainer Elder Bowcutt got to go back to Bade and baptize the 2 kids, Curtis and Janet, of the the Lin Family they taught while they were there together

Baptism of Ashutosh (middle) and Rose Andres (far right), 2nd right (Elder Wang, Jordan's companion), 2nd left (Jordan Mayberry) He is a cool member that Jordan loved to talk sports with.

This is a place that Jordan ate lunch at - cheap dumplings for a little less than 2 bucks!

Jordan being cool with two of his missionary buddies during English meeting - left Elder Frank Xu, and on the right Elder Zhong

A Halloween activity that the missionaries did in the Jin Hua Ward. This is the ward mission.There were eight missionaries in that ward