1st Baptism!

 

 

Hello!

  We've had a great week this week. Jin DeTao was baptized on Sunday! :) It was an awesome experience. He's one of my favorite people that I've ever met. Super funny and super solid. He gave his testimony during the service and I was nervous that he'd start telling dirty jokes or something, but he gave a super powerful testimony, especially about the restoration and the atonement. He was super grateful to the missionaries for helping him quit smoking after 36 years, but I honestly feel like we hardly helped him at all with that. He truly relied on the atonement for everything. Awesome guy. We've also got 4 more baptismal dates set for this month, the cantonese/vietnamese family of 3 is scheduled to be baptized on the 21st. They're an awesome family, they read the book of mormon in vietnamese every night as a family, and the mom is making huge changes in order to apply the gospel into her family's life. We were able to give her a blessing the other day, and it was easy to tell the faith she had in the priesthood after that. And she's the only one that understands mandarin so I can communicate with her, haha. We've been teaching and finding a lot more these past few weeks, and it feels so good just to watch things play out in the Lords way. Our ward is struggling though, for the past few months we've only had about 60 people showing up to sacrament every week. So these next few weeks, now that we're able to eat with members again, we're really trying to focus on getting the ward re-involved in missionary work. I feel like i'm finally catching a vision of what I want my whole mission to be like, and I'm slowly being able to put it all together and make it happen.

   Sounds like you guys have had a rough week with all the sicknesses! I've been sick this week as well, but nothing that'll kill me. :) Hope everyone is feeling better by now! We had an awesome zone conference yesterday, I love President Becerra. He really knows exactly what he's doing, and he knows the doctrine so well. He's always making new changes and trying new things, like he just put texting on all our phones. Not that it will really do anything for us because you can't type chinese on american phones... but maybe! haha.

  Things are going well! I'm a happy man. thanks for everything! Enjoy the pictures! I really don't take very many pictures... I'll try to take more. haha. love you guys! Have a good week.

 

Love, ben.