Hello Gatihng!
It's December! What in the world! I just started having to wear a sweater this week. One of the new elders from Malaysia said it was nice to move somewhere that has 4 seasons, and I had to restrain an incredulous laugh.
Anyway, this week was good! On Tuesday while we were street contacting, we ran into this 80-something year old man pushing his own wheelchair. In talking to him we found out that he had no way to get home, since he couldn't get his wheelchair onto a bus, and he lived a 20ish minute walk for a healthy person up the mountain, and he had a limp on one side from a stroke. So Sister Wong and I, being the strong young ladies we are, pushed him back home. It definitely got our heart rates up, but it felt good to serve someone who was in so much need. He said if he had had to walk home, it would have taken him 4 hours. We also discovered his apartment was quite dirty, as he can hardly get around and his kids don't take care of him like they should, despite the fact that they all live in Hong Kong. So we came back for a few hours the next 2 days and helped him clean his apartment--mainly the kitchen and the bathroom, because they were the most dirty. We found some cockroaches and plenty of cockroach eggs. We were happy we could get him into healthier living conditions. While I was cleaning, I made a fun discovery too-- a 2-gallon jar of homemade alcohol made from, get this, PICKLED SNAKES. When I asked our old friend about it, he said he brewed it in the 70s, and it's worth a lot, so I definitely couldn't throw it away. The snakes in there had to be at least 2 inches in diameter. What the random?? Who would EVER think to drink alcohol made from snakes? According to Sister Wong, though, it's not too uncommon here and it is quite valuable. Crazy. Now the elders are starting to teach him the gospel, and we'll probably stop by occasionally to help him clean up.
On Friday our conference issue of the Liahona finally got here! Hallelujah! It's only a month late! And the Chinese one doesn't come in until next week. I felt sad for Sister Wong, since she can't read it yet. I've already made it to the Priesthood Session. Haha. I love conference! Also, when I was flipping through it, I made another fun discovery! On the back of the big centerfold chart of the first presidency, 12, 70s, etc, there was a picture of Elder and Sister Connelly, the senior couple over the YSA in the Edinburgh Ward, aka the ward I lived in last fall! It was so fun to see them in there!
This week our district all had interviews with President Hawks, and he basically told me I need to prepare myself to be able to train new missionaries by the time the big flood of missionaries comes in in April, since we're getting more than 10 sisters, and will probably have just as many coming in the moves after that since the general conference announcement. He was like "don't be offended when I say this, but you're not ready to train right now." And I was like "Are you kidding President? I would think you were crazy if you thought I were ready to train." I didn't quite phrase my reply to him like that, but that's pretty much what ran through my mind. So that's kind of intimidating, because I'll have only been out here 8 months when April rolls around, which means I really need to work on my language and everything else skills.
This week I feel like I've also gained quite a testimony of the importance/effectiveness of members and missionaries working together to do missionary work. We had a correlation meeting this week with all the ward missionaries and a member of the bishopric where we discussed all the members of our ward and made a list of part-member and less active families for the missionaries to visit. When I talked to those active family members on Sunday, I could tell they really felt loved and excited the ward and the missionaries wanted to help their families. The ward's also making the Christmas Party into a huge missionary effort-- they're getting people to invite all their family members and friends. Members of the bishopric and relief society will be visiting less active families with us this coming week to invite them to our Christmas Party and invite them to come to church. The bishopric also wants to start doing visits like that once a month starting in January as part of the ward mission plan. Our ward rocks! And we were finally able to visit the bishop on Sunday (we haven't been able to before because he's super busy), and he gave us so many less active names to focus on, and his RM daughter gave us 4 referrals and will ask 4 or 5 other friends to hear the gospel. It was amazing. And on Sunday I had the chance to briefly speak with the Young Men's President (who I didn't know was the Young Men's President until he told me), and he let me know how Tom's doing in Young Men's and what we can do to help him out more there, i.e. finding better fellowshippers. It was awesome! I hope the level of correlation stays this way!
So yeah, this week was quite good. Looking forward to the next one!
Love,
Sister Heaton
No comments:
Post a Comment