Taiwan Week 18 - Christmas Without Snow

Hello all of you wonderful people!

I hope you had a beautiful white Decembery week! I keep forgetting it's December here because there is no whiteness to be had, but it has become a lot colder though! This week was full of exciting things, miracles, tender mercies, growth spurts, all of the above :)

This week was Sister Exchanges so I got to go to Xi Tai Nan with Sister Liu and I loved it! She is an adorable girl from Taibei who joined the church less than two years ago! She is a stellar missionary and I learned so much from her :) She has a great attitude about missionary work, is so humble, and really gives it her all. O best part.....we ate dinner at.....COSTCO! Yes, I had a delicious Costco hot dog in Taiwan- it was mmmmhhhhmmm good :D

I got to go on another Sister Exchange on Saturday with Sister Walbrecht as President Bishop approved a little mini "Dong Qu" Sister Exchange for us 4 sisters. We had a blast together! She is just full of love and we saw many miracles with less actives and investigators. The miracle story this week comes from her......we had gone to visit a member on Saturday morning and I remembered there was a less-active who lived right down the street who we had not visited for awhile. She is from Brazil and is married to a Taiwanese man. We decided to just stop for a few minutes and see if she was home,which she was! She was on her way out, but said we could come in for a few minutes. We sat down and started talking to her and then Sister Walbrecht, being the spirit led missionary she is, asked her if she would come to church this Sunday and help guan xi our investigators. I had never seen this less active sister at church and when I had previously visited her, she still said she wasn't ready to come to church. So I wasn't really expecting her to say anything.....BUT she said yes!! And then she came to church the next day!! The ward was elated to see her and everyone was coming up to her. She said she felt a lot of love and feels like yue lai yue she will be able to become fully active. It was a huge, wonderful, happy miracle :D Helping less-actives is such a beautiful part of missionary work! It always reminds me how much the Lord and Heavenly Father loves His children.....He never, ever, ever forgets them :D O! and remember LJQ? She was a less active we had been working with in the 1st ward before it was split and the other sisters told me she is now officially active! So happy!

Investigators are all just dandy :) Through her daily prayer and scripture study, ZJM's faith is growing more and more. We have an adorable young mom, CJM, who is a sister of a husband of a family in the ward. We have been meeting with her every Sunday and she is recognizing from her brother and sister-in-law's testimony, what a blessing this Gospel is to families. It's an absolute treasure to meet with an investigator and have their family members also help us to teach and bear testimony. I'm always way more nervous for lessons with members' family members, but the Spirit is always there to guide and teach :)

So you've been asking about a typical proselyting day.....well here's how it goes!

Wake up at 6:30....roll out of bed and do some exercising and then get ready for the day
8:00-10:30....Studies! Personal, companion, and language study
10:30....depart for the day! We usually have a lesson at 11 or we will go finding (tracting, contacting, etc.)
12ish- eat lunch and do some more language study!
1ish- lesson time, finding, etc. In Taiwan, a huge mode of finding is through contacting at intersections which I have really come to love! You just pull up to people, meet them really fast, share a 5 second message and try to get them to pull over...it's great :) We also do quite a bit of tracting too....I prefer night time tracting, but this week we are going to try some caroling tracting for Christmas!
5:00- eat dinner :) and then we just have lessons, visiting people, finding, or meetings until 9 and then we plan for the next day, finish calling some people, etc. and get ready for bed.......and that would conclude my 1 minute tour of a missionary's day :)

I am so grateful to be a missionary at Christmas time- it is the best thing ever :) I absolutely love singing Christmas songs in lessons right before we teach about the Gospel- it doesn't get much better than that. I'm so grateful for this Christmas season to focus on the birth of our Savior and let the entire world know that He lives and loves us. Maybe there's no snow here, but His Spirit is. I pray that we, both members and missionaries, will be able to find people in these coming weeks who are in need and searching for their Savior's love and atoning power. Have a wonderful CHRISTmas filled week :)

Love you all so much and am so grateful for all of your love and letters!

Sister J. :)

Taiwan Week 17 - Trust in the Lord With All Thine Heart

See pictures below! We think "shi yi feng xian" is a reference to tithing.

Wu an!!!

Hello my dearest wonderful family and friends!! I hope you all had a very happy and energized week :) Just realized this week is my 5 month mark---crazy! The weather is changing here and I LOVE it! It's just barely chill, but everyone wears big coats and parkas....but it's nothing compared to a Utah cold so I'm just in my little sweater confusing all of the people I pass on my bike :)

Funny story: We were visiting one of Sister Liang's old members and her brother made his son speak to me in English for 10 minutes before he could play his computer games....poor kid :)

What a wonderful week of blessings! We had some great lessons and also had some great tracting experiences this week!

First off - Dear Sweet ZJM..........This was quite the week with ZJM. She gave up tea on Tuesday and we were elated by her faith! We taught Shi yi feng xian on Thursday with a great pei-ke (member) couple and ZJM had some questions, but it all seemed fine. When we came back Friday, she seemed a little different. She said she felt like there were too many commandments and had been drinking tea that day :( My heart broke.....we found out she had a lot of concerns with shi yi feng xian. As we were talking to her, we reemphasized the Plan of Salvation and other parts of the Gospel to help her understand the importance of commandments. It didn't really seem to be helping her.....we finally asked her how she felt about her relationship with Heavenly Father and she said she still didn't even really know if He was there or if He listened to her prayers. Aha....that was the key :) We realized we needed to focus on her relationship with Heavenly Father, through daily prayer and scriptures, and set everything else aside for a little bit because this was the most important thing. This was one of those "how to be a better missionary moments" ;) Everything just seemed to be good with her, so we kept teaching her the commandments and knew her faith would be fine. The problem was that she had a little foundation of her trust in God, but it wasn't very strong. If an investigator understands their relationship with God, prays with an earnest heart to Him, and reads the scriptures to grow closer to Him....than they will be fine to live the commandments and progress quickly to making a baptismal covenant.

There is an awesome triangle depiction I learned in the MTC: Heavenly Father at the top connected to the missionaries in the left corner, who are then connected to the investigator/less active in the right corner, who is then connected to Heavenly Father. All of the relationship lines are important, but if the investigators line with Heavenly Father is not the darkest and strongest, true conversion won't take place. Now how do we strengthen our relationship with Heavenly Father???? PRAYER, SCRIPTURE STUDY, CHURCH :D Isn't that amazing? The three simplest parts of the Gospel: daily prayer and scripture study and attending church are all it takes to come to know our true relationship with Heavenly Father and our Savior. I feel that Heavenly Father was really helping me to understand this principle this week......if our foundation is not strong, it won't hold our for long......our relationship with our loving Heavenly Father and Savior need to be the strongest part of our faith! So this is what Zhen JM is seeking to do right now and am so grateful for her humble attitude and pure desire to receive an answer from Heavenly Father. I know that I have to continually build upon this foundation every day, so when the rains come (and they do!) I can stand strong through Faith in my Savior :)

We have two other great investigators right now, both moms :)....one who has a Christian background, who is so humble and willing to read and pray - she is earnestly seeking to feel Heavenly Father's love. We have another whose family is Buddhist, but she has always been interested in Jesus Christ and His Gospel. She is also so humble and sweet, and I feel that Heavenly Father is really preparing her to accept this beautiful Gospel :) O we also have an adorable 72 year old a ma and her 12 year old grand-daughter who we are also teaching.....they have had a hard life, and we know this Gospel can bring them much needed love and joy :) We had two Less Actives who came to church on Sunday, who both have not been for a long while :) That is one of my favorite things - to see a less active return to church and partake of the Sacrament :)

I'm learning a lot from LJM :) She has amazing empathy and love when she teaches - you can't help but want the joy of the Gospel when she teaches about it.

Well I love you all so much! I know that this Gospel saves lives....reiterating my favorite scripture (it means way more now then it ever has :) ) "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding, in all they ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct they paths." Our Savior loves each one of you so very much and knows us all so personally.....I'm grateful for this time to share with these people that they have a Savior who loves them!

Love you!!

Sister J.

The Sister Missionaries of Tainan!

Sis. Jarvis & Sis. Liang