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

13 Weeks Remaining- December 29, 2013

大家好

Here some things we did this past week - 

- We went to the Bishop’s house with a bunch of other members and celebrated his birthday. We ate a bunch of food and sang happy birthday to him. It always fun spending time with the members.

-On Christmas we went to the church by the temple and had a conference with the mission president and all of the Taipei area missionaries. They gave us some training and then we ate a big meal the mission president's wife put together - turkey, rolls, stuffing, etc. It was good stuff. Afterwards, they did a talent show and they gave us a present. The present was a copy of Doctrine and Covenants with 3 columns in it - English, Chinese characters, and the alphabetized pronunciation of the characters (Roman Pinyin). We have this same thing for the Book of Mormon. It was cool because last month I got to help proofread it & help correct it before they bound it into a book. After the Conference, we went back to our area and went to a subway. There we sang carols with the other elders in our district while we handed out gospel pamphlets.

-Later during the week, we went to go visit a less active the ward wanted us to visit. It was in the boonies. We had to take the subway, then a bus, and then we walked up a mountain for about an hour. We get there and there was 2 dogs barking at us. But they would just back up when we walked towards them. So we walked around looking for the house and the area is looking abandoned. But then we looked out into a rice field and see this guy. We asked if he knew the less active, but all he did was wave a machete at us. Eventually we find the house. We knock on the door and an older lady comes out. We tell her that we were the missionaries and she just starts yelling in our face - saying “Why the heck did you come here?! We aren’t Christian!” She was the wife of the less active. After a while though, she calmed down and we were able to sit down and talk to her and the son. She had no interest in the church but the son might start coming to our English class.

-This week, I ate some chicken foot and cow tongue. Also I got shocked walking into some restaurant’s bathroom that was a boy and girl bathroom together all in one. I guess it’s pretty common here but it was the first time I encountered it since being here lol.

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas

Love,

Elder Chatman

14 Weeks Remaining- December 23, 2013

聖誕節快樂 (Merry Christmas)

Monday - So to start off the day, we went tracting. Literally, the first doorbell we pressed, a college kid came out. We talked about Christ and such for a few minutes and he was interested. But he was busy at that moment, so we setup another time later in the week to meet with him at our church. That was cool meeting him. However later in the week, he never showed up to our scheduled appointment. We tracted for about an hour and half that night and then went to a subway station exit and handed out flyers to our free English class for another hour.

Tuesday - It was pouring rain so went tracting for an hour in the morning. Then we had district meeting and then after that we tracted the rest of the day until 8pm. At 8:00, we did two baptismal interviews for some elders in our zone. Both of the investigators passed their interviews. One of the investigators was scheduled to get baptized on Sunday, but when Sunday rolled around she got cold feet and didn’t show up...

Wednesday - We tracted all day till 4:00. At 4:00, we met with Zhang Ren Kui, our new convert. He is going strong and doing good. Then at night, we had English class. My companion and I taught the beginner class. English class is one of our mission’s most effective tools for finding new investigators. A super nice lady from China came to our class this past week. She has only lived in Taiwan for 2 months. The sister missionaries are going to try and start teaching her. After English class, we met with our investigator Li Yun Zhong. He is a college student who came to English class about 6 months ago and started meeting with missionaries since. We are probably going to stop meeting with him though because he won’t do what we invite him to do - like read from the Book of Mormon and come to church. We've invited him to do these things almost every lesson but he never does. So it’s pointless to keep meeting with him because he'll never develop a testimony unless he does these things. He is a cool kid though.

Thursday - The Assistants to the President came to our apartment during studies and talked with us about our zone. They gave us some training on being better leaders. One of the AP’s is real smooth. He's from Singapore, already graduated from BYU, served a few years in the military, and is going to Harvard after his mission. Later that night, we did some street contacting, where we go around and talk to people on the road. Also that night, we had dinner with our ward missionaries and ward mission leader at a steak house. It wasn’t an American steak but I just drowned it in A-1 sauce so it was all good. haha

Friday - We did more tracting and street contacting. At night though, we met with the Yang Family. We taught them all about church and how it blesses our lives and then invited them to come. I thought we taught it well but they didn’t end up committing to come. The dad works on Sundays and the mom says their 1 year old daughter has to sleep in the morning when church is. So they are temporarily stuck until we can get them to come to church.

Saturday - We met with one of our newer investigators named Liam. We met him a month ago on the subway. He wasn’t too interested in meeting then but as he was leaving we gave him a flyer to our English class. Then 2 weeks ago, to our surprise, he showed up to our free English class and has started meeting with us since. We taught him the Restoration this week and it went really good. He committed to read and pray about the Book of Mormon. Believe it or not, he actually lived in Portland, Oregon for a couple of years.

Sunday - We had church, studies and then met with another one of investigators named Chen. He is a college student. We met him one day while tracting. He was riding by on his bike and we stopped him. We reviewed the Restoration with him this week. We taught it to him 2 weeks ago but he forgot most of it.

My companion and I almost got in TV this past week. This lady who lives in our apartment community works for a TV station and they were getting a couple foreigners to come on the station. They wanted to ask them questions about Chinese culture and the Chinese New Year. We were supposed to go on this weekend. My companion and I were super pumped but we asked the mission president and he said he didn’t want us to do it. So it’s a no go….oh well.

Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas. 

Remember the Savior this Christmas and feel his love for you!

Love,

Elder Chatman

15 Weeks Remaining- December 15, 2013

December 15, 2013

 大家好

The highlight of the week was being able to meet a General Authority.

Elder Packe,r from the Quorum of the Seventy, came to Taiwan. He did a two hour devotional with us (all the missionaries.) lt was cool being able to shake his hand and feel Christ’s love emulating from God's servant. He talked to us a lot about family history and how we can help our investigators and converts prepare to help their ancestors receive salvation. That’s something that’s a really special treat over here.  If you go back a few generations with the Taiwanese people, their ancestors are all from China, where no one had the gospel. So it’s super cool to be able to be a part of helping the ancient Chinese receive salvation. Family history work is great too in that it helps our converts stay active in the church, which is a huge problem over here. 

What else is new? It is kind of like the weeks in the past..... we've just been tracting and street contacting most of the day. It’s been sad to see some of our investigators lose interest or just not see why the gospel is so important in their lives. That’s probably one of the toughest things to see as a missionary. You develop so much love for your investigators but then seeing them lose desire in your message is tough. But it’s all good. We are excited to go out and try to find some more prepared souls this week.

Love,

Elder Chatman