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