Week 35- December 25, 2012

Week 35

December 25, 2012

Shengdan Jie Kuaile (Merry Christmas),

It feels so weird that it is Christmas right now. Taiwan doesn’t celebrate Christmas because most people don’t believe in Jesus Christ.  So it doesn’t feel very Christmasy, but it is nice to be in the English ward this part of year. Some families have and are having us over during this time of year so it nice to get a little bit of Christmas spirit in there.

The work was a little slow for me and my companion this past week. We had a bunch of people that set up appointments with us and then they just never showed up. That’s always a letdown because you get all prepared and then they never show. Some more good news, Benjamin committed to be baptized next Sunday.  But we told him he first had to come to church on Sunday and make a consistent effort to come weekly. It was going to be good - church Sunday, baptismal interview this week, baptism Sunday….. he was like yeah, “I’m in, let do this.”  But then he never showed up on Sunday for church and won’t answer our phone calls. Not sure what the problem is, but we are working to try and find out. Oh and the girl from Germany that we were teaching, was on the news last week. She sells like these Taiwanese cupcake things and apparently they are really good. So she was on the news which attracted tons of people. So she has to work every day now, all day. We even went out to go visit her, but the line to buy her cupcakes was huge! So we didn’t get a chance to talk with her.  Yes, another great story, another one of our investigators, Shawn, recently hasn’t answered our calls, so haven’t seen in him in 2 weeks! Then we were biking in the Taipei traffic madness and from the corner of my eye, I saw him. We stopped to talk with him and he was excited to see us. He was like, “hey can we meet tonight?” We were like, “of course” and setup a time to meet.  Then he never showed up and stopped answering his calls! Irritating...but not much is in our control. Everybody has their agency, one of the greatest gifts God has given us!

So we are struggling a bit right now in teaching people, but we're going to keep going and hopefully hit some success soon.

Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas!

Elder Chatman