18 Weeks Remaining -November 24, 2013

November 24, 2013

大家好

Transfers were this week. My companion and I both stayed here in our same area.
This week we did tons of contacting and tracting. We got a couple of phone numbers and gave out a Book Of Mormon but not a ton of success this week. Right now we are getting ready to stop meeting with a lot of our investigators. A lot of them just aren't progressing. One guy is super cool!  But we asked him this week, if he got an answer that God exists and the Book of Mormon is true, would that mean anything to him. He said no. He said that his life would pretty much be the same. The whole eternal life concept is really hard for the Taiwanese people to understand. When we talk about eternal things, it really has no meaning to them. They are super stuck on the here and now.
The funny story of the week.... we were out walking around the street contacting people. At one point I looked across the street and I see this guy pointing at us. He then runs across the street pointing at us. He asked us if we can speak Chinese. We say yeah. Then he just goes off yelling at us saying that we committed huge sins if we aren't vegetarians and other stuff. He even poked my companion in the shoulder at one point. I got out there before he could poke me though because that would have made me mad.
Anyways, things are going good....

Gan En Jie Kuaile (Happy Thanksgiving)
Love,
Elder Chatman

Jordan's hood lol - neighboor's to the TuCheng Chapel

Jordan's church building, TuCheng JiaoHui is the name of it.

20 Weeks Remaining -November 10, 2013

November 10, 2013

20 Weeks Remaining

大家好

This Saturday our investigator Zhang Ren Kui is getting baptized. He is a super nice guy. He's a junior in college right now. My companion talked to him on the street the transfer before I got here. Then he's met with us once a week up to this point. I am excited for him.

Last night, we met with a less active Melchezidek priesthood holder (a person in our church who had been ordained to an office in the priesthood) and tried to help him become active again. The sisters and my companion and I made pork dumplings with him. He is super cool. He's in the Air Force and he was telling us stories from 20 years ago when China and Taiwan were not getting along. One time he had to fly near China and take photos of their military. So he got there and had to wait 15 seconds to take the picture but at the same time his radar showed two Chinese planes coming right at him to take him down. So right when the 15 seconds were up and the pictures were taken, he did a U turn and booked it back to Taiwan super fast. He flew back from the coast of China to Taiwan in 5 minutes. That is crazy.

This week we did a couple hours of tracting and talking to people on the streets. We had tons of rejection but I do have cool story. We were walking to dinner one day and we passed this guy who was smoking. I had a small feeling that I should talk to him, but I didn’t because I was kind of sick of rejection. So I kept walking. But then when we were like 15 feet away from him, I turned me head to look at him and he was looking at me. So I waved and he waved back. So I went up and started talking to him. He was pretty interested and we ended up giving him a Book of Mormon and hopefully he sets up a time to meet this week.

Hope everyone’s doing well!

Love,

Elder Chatman

21 Weeks Remaining -November 3, 2013

大家好, 

 So this week was pretty cool. We had Mission Leadership Council. At the beginning of every month, all of the zone leaders, sister leaders, APs, office elders, and the mission president and his wife get together for a 7 hour meeting to talk about our mission vision, problems, goals, etc. First we had some trainings by the mission president's wife, the APs, and the sisters who are in charge of temple square. Then we went to the mission home and had taco salad. It was so good to get some American food finally.(It's funny he calls "tacos"- American food, and it is funny because he would have never eaten that before he left!! haha)  Then after that we had accountability. Each of the zone leaders had to get up and report about our zone baptismal number from last month - why it was high or low and what our plan for the upcoming month is. Our zone had 3 baptisms last month and our mission had 30 baptisms. Our mission president felt like we could do a lot better than that and so he came up with some really cool things that we are going to do as a mission. I love our mission president! This guy is super inspired and comes up with the coolest ideas. Here are a few things he shared with us:

1. White Christmas - We set a mission goal of having 99 baptisms in December and baptizing people on Christmas Day.

2. Missionary Typhoon - Right now on the east coast, there is only a district there but its pretty close to becoming a stake. There just isn't enough members yet. So last week he sent like 20 missionaries down there who only tracted and street contacted people all day for 5 days. They ended giving out a couple hundred Book of Mormons and getting like 140 new investigators for the missionaries down there to start teaching. That was super cool.

3. New Stakes - Right now a lot of the wards have enough members for new stakes to be made but there are sooooooo many are less active that there is not enough Melchizidek Priesthood holders to allow them to make the new stakes. So our mission president broke down the numbers and told us how many more active MP holders each of our wards needs in order for a new stake to be made and then challenged us to get that many by March 1. He thinks 10 new stakes can be made by then (5 in our mission, 5 in the Taizhong mission). If that happens, he said there is a possibility a new temple could be made here.

Love,

 Elder Chatman

This is a leadership council meeting at the mission home of President and Sister Daye.