1 Week Remaining -March 23, 2014

March 23, 2014

LAST EMAIL!!!

Well this is it!! The last email home!! I can’t believe it’s here. The time has flown. I still don't feel like I’m going home this week. 

Well, we had pretty good week this past week.

Sister He got baptized and it went really well. We also had a zone conference. We received some training from the mission president. We also had stake conference. Another cool thing that happened is that two weeks ago, we ran into Zhang Ren Kui outside of the subway. He is a recent convert that we baptized back in November, but since has gone less active. We hadn’t been able to get a hold of him, so I was happy to run into him. We met with him this past week and are trying to help him get active again.

Lastly, I just want to say that I have loved my mission and I’m so sad to be leaving these wonderful Taiwanese people. I'm so grateful that through serving a mission & focusing on others, God has sculpted me more and more into the person that he wants me to be. This is only a start in an eternal process. I love my mission! It has influenced me in such a way that I’m changed forever!

God is love! See everyone really soon.

Love,

Elder Chatman

People put red stuff around their doors to try and bless their house and bring themselves good luck.  It is like the symbolism of the blood that they put around at the time of Moses.

This is Jordan playing a Taiwanese game at a mental hospital.  It was a service thing that he was doing while on exchanges in Sanxia.

This is under the basement at some of the other elders' apartment.  It is full of scooters. On exchanges in SanXia. In the far middle is a hilarious, Elder Martin. Jordan went on exchanges with the Sanxia Elders once a week his last transfer per instructions from the illustrious ex-AP Elder Tay

This is a family that Jordan went to for dinner - Xu2 Jia1ting.  Dixiong (Ivan) served his mission in Texas perfect English and loved basketball. His wife served in the Taizhong mission.  Jordan thought they were super cool.

This is Jordan at the Ding Family's house for dinner. They had the missionaries over a lot when Jordan served in the ward, TuCheng ward. They had all six missionaries from the ward over - Sister Gummow, Sister Gruwell, Elder Martin, Elder Hawkins, Jordan, and his companion Elder Miller

This is a place along side of the road where the lady is doing eyebrows with a string.

She is using her mouth to hold the string as she does the girl's eyebrows.  

This is a haircutting spot along the side of a road.

This is Sister He.  She got baptized by Jordan right before he came home off his mission.  He was happy about that.

This is a view from Jordan's apartment in Taipei.  He could see 7-11 from his window.  7-11 were on almost every street corner in Taiwan. A one mile radius in Taipei would likely include five 7-11s.

2 Weeks Remaining- March 16, 2014

March 16, 2014

Hey, what it is up?  I’m so sorry. Today we had some really important stuff going on so I have no time to write. 

But I am okay and safe. I may or may not have a baptism this upcoming week. 

I am looking forward to seeing you soon!

Love you guys! 

Jordan

3 Weeks Remaining- March 9, 2014

March 9, 2014

大家好．

It was a really good week this past week. God worked a lot of miracles for us.

On Monday, we met with Sister Xu. She has been reading the Book of Mormon and praying. She has felt that what we are teaching is true. We showed her the baptismal font and she said she just felt really good when we showed her it and talked about baptism. She committed to be baptized at the end of this month.

On Tuesday, we met with Brother Chen, who is a college student. He committed to be baptized the end of this month as well and we gave him a permission slip for baptism to give to his mom. She is Daoist, so she may not be cool with it, but we're praying for a miracle.

This week, we also started meeting with Sister He. She works by the temple area so she had been meeting with the temple sisters.  But she actually lives in our area, so she can only get baptized if she comes to our ward. She's super...spiritual, I guess you could say. This week, she came to 9:00 am sacrament in our ward and then went to the 11:00 English ward church meeting as well. That is like 45 minutes from our chapel. She can’t speak English very well, but she likes going to the English ward because she says she can understand from the speakers what God wants her to understand. She has a special situation. She really wants to get baptized but she won’t commit to come to our ward..... 

Also this week, the less active I’ve mention before - Brother Chen, he committed to come to church March 23rd and to bring his non member daughter and wife with him...leggo.

That’s pretty much the scoop. 

Love,

Elder Chatman

4 Weeks Remaining -March 2, 2104

March 2, 2014

帥哥門好

So this week went pretty good.

We've recently started meeting with a Sister Xu. She met missionaries on the street in a different part of Taipei. Then the sister missionaries here called her at like 10:00 pm one night and tried to setup a time to meet her. At first, she was going to say no and then was like, “Wow, you guys have it rough…. 10:00 at night and you’re still calling people. Then the sisters were like, “No, this makes us happy doing this stuff.” She was like, “Wow I want that kind of happiness.” So she set up a time to meet. Since she lives in our area, we've been meeting with her (at a 2 story Mcdonalds...) She's really good - prays and reads and has a strong desire to get an answer. Plus she already believes in God, so that makes it a million times easier.

We also met again with the less active that used to be really solid in the church. He wants to come back, but just needs some friends in the ward. So this week we brought the elders’ quorum president and that went good. We couldn't understand part of it though because they started talking in Taiwanese to each other. But they are friends now and he promised to come to church at least once before I go home. 

This week we got two less actives to come to church and a guy we met on the street 2 transfers ago came as well.

We've also recently been setting up lots of less actives and then inviting the home teachers to accompany us with the lesson. This has helped a lot. Almost no one in Taiwan does home teaching except like the leaders. (home teaching is when each person is assigned to visit certain families or individuals each month to make sure they are doing ok. Then if there is any problems or needs that can get help from the people in the ward.) You know how like every month the ward has a percentage of how much home teaching they do? Our ward had been getting 5% percent month...yep not too great huh? After we've started to help, it got up to 12% last month. So yeah lots of work to do…. so many problems could be solved with less actives and lots of baptisms would be a result if home teaching got done.

But yeah anyways that’s what’s up out here.

Love,

Elder Chatman

5 Weeks Remaining -February 23, 2014

Well, it was an eventful week. We had an earthquake, our apartment flooded, and Elder Holland visited.

So on Saturday, Elder Holland and a Seventy came and did a missionary devotional. We all got to shake his hand which was cool.

Then he spoke to us for about an hour. His talk so great!! He definitely lived up to the hype. Here are some of the things he talked about:

>One of the few things left that the Quorum of the Twelve don’t delegate is assigning missionaries where they serve.

>You don’t have any idea what the Lord has prepared for you. We (Elder Holland and the leaders on the stand) were once where you are.

>We (Elder Holland and the leaders on the stand) don’t sacrifice our time, efforts, leave family and home to get up and do this every day for a "cunningly devised fable" (2 Peter 1:16).  If you don’t get anything else from my words, just get this - know that we know that this is true, and don’t you forget it!

>That no man in the history of the world was changed more by his mission than me. We fight about that amongst ourselves in the Quorum of the Twelve even to fists. Can you imagine me and Richard Scott duking it out? (He raises his fist) hahaha

>Put it all on the line on your mission. The results might be big or small, but God only measures your effort.

>From your mission we just want one convert. Yourself! You are the cake and any more converts are the icing and we want lots of icing!

>Would you want your converts to crash and burn after you get home? Then I really hope you won’t.

>You are God's investigators. He is teaching you right now. You want your investigators to repent, he wants you to repent! You want your investigators to pray more mightily, he wants you to pray more mightily! The habits you learn on your mission, are habits for the rest of your life.

>Your mission is the ascending curve in your eternal progression

>When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child (but when I went on my mission and came home), I put away childish things. (Corinthians)

>You've got to be a little bit more persistent. My wife has an Avon makeup lady that is more persistent than some of you. It seems like she is at our house every day. Some things are worth being persistent over. not obnoxious, but bold.

>KNOW the gospel. With preach my gospel, it’s different than the discussions. We give you the gospel and some outlines and scriptures, and then you have to do something with it. With the discussions, we taught them and had them come to us. With preach my gospel, we go to them and we take them with us through the Sacred Grove and to the Garden of Gethsemane.

>Why are missions so hard? My mission was the hardest work in my entire life (and I worked construction before my mission). Salvation is not a cheap experience. The gospel isn’t easy, repentance isn’t easy, and the decision to be baptized isn’t easy, so why would your mission be easy?

This is so hard because it was never easy for the Savior. You are going to have to go where the Savior went and do what He did. We are atoners like He was, a little bit on your mission. You are going to have to drag the cross for a bit like He did and shed some of the tears like He did. Then you'll know a little bit more about what He went through. Don’t plan on having a picnic here in Taiwan. The perfect situation doesn’t happen. It didn’t happen for the Savior and can’t for you, if you want to be his disciple. No, I’m not saying seek suffering, it will find you. Don’t whimper. Embrace it and know that it is the path to salvation.

>People at home don’t have a ghost of what a mission is, but they are proud of you and have you on a pedestal. So be your best self.

>Promise me you'll be faithful the rest of your lives. Promise me that and we'll change the world. We'll absolutely change the world!

Love,

Elder Chatman

As a side note, Jordan said he got to shake Elder Holland’s hand which he was excited about.  Jordan asked him if he knew his dad (Jeff) which he did. (He used to be the president of BYU when Jeff played basketball there.)  Then he said he grabbed his collar and said, “you’re my ball player!  You’re my player!  Then he asked if he was keeping in shape.  Lol  Jordan got a kick out of that!   

A picture of Jordan with his mission when Elder Holland came and spoke.  He is on the far right by the wall and curtain.

6 Weeks Remaining -February 16, 2014

February 16, 2014

各位好 ,

So this week we changed up our approach a little bit and spent a lot of time identifying less actives members. Then we tried getting in contact with them because:

 A. there are so many of them (our ward was the highest baptizing ward in all of Taiwan 2 years ago, but only a few of them are still active today) and

B.  we've been street contacting and tracting like crazy but getting nothing. So we feel like this will be a more effective approach to finding people to teach and baptize.

So last week, we met with a less active member who has been a member for 20+ years and has the Melchizedek priesthood and everything. He got offended a while back in his previous ward and has never been back since. So we called him up this past week and he said that he usually rejects missionaries and members that try to call him. He said that for some reason this time he felt ready to come back and ended up meeting with us. We had a good lesson with him and he's going to start coming back to church soon. Also his wife and daughter aren’t members and he's going to start bringing them to church too.

An interesting fact of the week.... this could be wrong but there is a city in our stake where we hold zone meetings and stuff at that is supposedly the highest populated per square foot area in the world. Crazy!

Have a good week!

Love,

Elder Chatman

7 Weeks Remaining- February 9, 2014

February 9, 2014

大家好

The big news of this week is that we figured out which apostle is coming to Taiwan....the man himself..... Elder Holland. That will be great!!

This past week, I went to a mission wide leadership meeting for all the district, zone, and sister leaders. It went all day for two days. It was a lot like the meeting I went to last year. It was cool to see missionaries that I haven’t seen in forever! All of the leaders had to give a training of some sort. Another elder and I had to do a mock lesson teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. Since everyone needed a little bit of energy by the time we started our training, we decided to mix it up. We got my MTC companion and some other funny elders to be the investigators and members. It spiced it up a bit and made it a bit humorous. It seemed like it went well. The best part of the meeting was when they sent all 50+ of us missionaries out to go street contacting around the temple area for an hour. Another elder and I met some cool people. We talked to this lady and her son for like 20 minutes and it was all over the place. We talked about English class, families, temple square tours, the Book of Mormon, Christ, prayer, and all in 20 minutes. In the end though, she wanted to stick with her Buddhist beliefs.

One time this week, when we were contacting, I go up to a guy and say hi. He thought we were the police. He pulls out a Republic of China passport and tries to give it to us. We were like, “No we are missionaries, here take our pamphlet.” But he just kept insisting that we take his passport. We didn’t, of course, and just left. That was weird. But outside of that, we saw some cool miracles. We gave out 4 Book of Mormons and met a cool family. The wife was from Chile and the husband was Taiwanese.

Anyways, that’s the scoop.

Much Love,

Elder Chatman

This is QinKe at the Ding family home

This is in the TuCheng Ward

This is QingKe with the Bishop during Chinese New Year

This is the TuCheng Ward

This is the leadership meeting with the whole mission

8 Weeks Remaining -February 2, 2014

新年快樂! (Happy Chinese New Year)

It’s like Washington's July weather over here. It is sunny but not crazy hot. Chinese New Year is really nice. We basically have lunch and dinner with members. Then we go out and tract because none of our investigators can meet (because of celebration stuff). 

Whats new?

Recently our mission president changed things up. Previously, in wards with 2 elders and 2 sisters - the elders would teach the males and the sisters would teach the female investigators in the ward. Now it got changed up, so that the ward is split into two areas - 1 for the elders and 1 for the sisters. All the investigators in your area, you get to teach, male and female. So now we get to teach the females again which will be a changeup. I am kind of used to it though because in the English ward and my first area, we didn’t have sister missionaries. 

We also learned when the Apostle comes, he'll be coming to our stake's member conference and our ward is singing in it...

Much love,

Elder Chatman

This is Chinese New Year Qing te Xu Jiemei  Tucheng Ward

This is Chinese New Year Qingte in the TuCheng Ward

Liang family

9 Weeks Remaining- January 28, 2014

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Here are some things that went on last week:

A. We called up a former investigator from about 2 years ago.... he had gotten busy and so he had stopped meeting. So we met with him and he was really good. He is Christian but hasn’t been to church in any church in a long time. We taught him a great lesson about the Restoration. He was confused on why he needed to be baptized again. We explained about proper authority and he is down to be baptized, if he gets an answer.

B. On Thursday, we had a training meeting all day. Our mission president and other leaders trained us. I got to translate it into Chinese for the Taiwanese missionaries so that made it interesting. It made it especially interesting since the mission president is from the south and uses tons of southern slang. For example - don’t go raiding my chicken coop.....how do you translate that into Chinese? haha

C. A recent convert that my companion and I taught and baptized in my last area, moved here to 土成 for work. So I get to keep teaching him which is cool.

D. On companion exchanges, Elder Martin and I saw a cool miracle. We were out street contacting. After about 30 minutes of rejection, we saw a guy across the street texting on his phone. He looked promising so we went over there and started talking with him. He turned out to be super interested. He said that recently he and his wife started watching a show about Jesus that a church in America broadcasts. He said they just felt good while watching it and wanted to know more about Christ but didn’t really understand much. So he set up to meet with Elder Martin and I after Chinese New Year is over. 奇蹟！

E. An apostle is coming to Taiwan at the end of February and he is doing a missionary fireside. So we are pretty pumped for that. It might be Elder Holland since he is over Asia. 

Love,

Elder Chatman

10 Weeks Remaining -January 20, 2014

January 19, 2014

大家好

Hello from Taiwan. Here’s the scoop from this week:

1. Two weeks ago, while street contacting, we contacted a guy that was leaving from the bank. We got his phone number in a quick minute and then he left. He set up an appointment this week. He is a member of the Presbyterian Church. On a side note - In Chinese the Presbyterian Church is called 長老教會 which translates to Elder Church. We, as missionaries, are called Elders (長老) so because our names are Elder and their name is the Elder Church people sometimes think we are the Presbyterian Church missionaries. Anyways, we met with this guy and taught him about the Restoration. It was weird because it actually made sense to him. When you teach someone with a typical Buddhist background, they usually have a really hard time understanding the Restoration in our first time teaching to them.

2. This week we met with one of our eternal investigator’s Brother 陳 (Chen). We taught him a great lesson on repentance using a conference talk from Elder Christopherson. He's super close to getting baptized. His biggest problem right now is just coming to church. 

3. The Elder's Quorum president was telling us a story about how he had searched for years looking for his genealogy (history of his family.) Then he finally found out that it was all in China. So he went over there and got it at all and found out a ton about his ancestors. He was telling us this story about how some of his ancestors built a weird looking building during a world war. America saw it from space and thought that China was building a missile. So they sent people over to China that looked like tourists to check it out. It turned out to be just a weird cylinder castle type building where they would cook, sleep, and do everything in the very center of it and then could fire out from the outer portions of the building from all sides. Its called 土樓 (tu lou). 

4. We ran into Michelle again. She is from Germany and almost got baptized last year when I was in the English ward. She just happened to move to the same area for work that I am at now. So we saw her one day at work while we were street contacting. Her problem is the same though as it was a year ago, in that she works on Sundays so she can’t come to church. 

Chinese New Year starts the end of next week.

Love,

Elder Chatman

11 Weeks Remaining- January 12, 2014

Hello everyone. Here is what happened this week:

1. We met with this older man who we had met on the street last week. We visited him at his home and shared the Book of Mormon. Then we invited him to be baptized. But he was like, "I'll wait until my next life (reincarnation) to believe the Mormon Church." We were like, "There is no next earth life (reincarnation), this is your only chance." He said he believed the Book of Mormon (even though he had only read 2 pages of it - that happens a lot here.) But he was shocked when we nicely said that reincarnation wasn't true because that's not what the Book of Mormon says. After that he just got stubborn and started randomly going off about how all Americans spend money and never save any. My companion was like, "Umm no that's not true. Some Americans save money.  My dad saves a lot of money." Then he started yelling at him saying, "You're speaking nonsense!" He wasn't mad though.  That's just the culture here. They like yell and talk really loud when they talk about opinionated subjects. Anyways, we'll probably not meet with him anymore......

2. We had English class Wednesday night. Last transfer, my companion and I had an idea to put up a sign advertising our English class on our church gate. Well it worked. A lady walking by saw it and came to our English class this week. Then afterwards, she ended up meeting with the sister missionaries and setting a baptismal date with them.

3. We met with our investigator Brother Cai. I think I've mentioned him before. When we meet with him its really easy for him to fall asleep. And when I mean easy, I mean like it'll take him 10 seconds and he'll be snoring in the middle of the lesson! We tried to get him involved by reading a scripture for example. He start reading it and he'll voice gets softer and softer, then stops and he is out cold. So this week we stood up and taught him for most of the lesson, weird huh?! It worked pretty good but then at the end he rested his arms on the table in front of him and fell asleep again. I've wanted to give up on him, but he has a strong desire and comes to church. Its not really his fault either that he falls asleep. He works almost all day and only gets 6 hours of sleep and his health is bad. So we're going to do our best to help him and let the Lord do the rest.

Love,

Elder Chatman

  An altar that is in many of the homes in Taiwan, even in members. In the picture is Elder Cai4. The Elder's in the ward were helping a member, Ye4 zi clean her family's house

Jordan in front of a preschool in Taiwan in Shu4 Lin2. They tracted the area all afternoon but got let in zero doors.

Progress record Jordan wrote up for Ward Mission Meeting (Xie2Tiao2Hui4)

This is Jordan tracting in one of the many apartment buildings.  He has to push a button and try to get people to open the door to let them in the building. 

This is Jordan's companion Elder Miller that is also tracting the buildings. 

12 Weeks Remaining -January 5, 2014

January 5, 2014

Xin Nian Kuail Le (happy new year)

I want to wish everyone a happy new year. New Year’s Eve isn’t too big over here because Chinese New Year’s is coming up next month. 

Here is some things I did this past week:

>I went on exchanges with one of Assistants to the President this week. That was an eye opener! They way he did things was different than anything I had done before. We mainly street contacted all day and his style was super business like and he didn't take no for an answer. People would like be like I’m busy and he pretty much would be like “No, stop. We want to share a special message with you” It would get kind of awkward at times but it worked. We found four new investigators in about two hours. I don’t know how interested the people really are, but in his opinion he says we do all we can in our part and whether they show up or not is up to them and their agency.

>We had transfers this week. It was a really weird transfer. We had no idea what was going to happen before except that my companion was getting transferred. He thought I would get a new zone leader companion and he would go back senior companion somewhere. What ended up happening was they combined our zone with a different zone. My companion and the other zone's zone leader became the new combined zone's zone leaders. I went back to district leader and I got a new companion from Minnesota. This is his fourth transfer and he is one of the eighteen year old missionaries. He's pretty funny and we are getting along good.

That’s pretty what happened this week. 

Love,

 Elder Chatman