Hello fammmmmmmmz.
I can't believe it's been 10 years
since 9-11! that blows my mind. It feels like just yesterday we were
watching it on TV before I went to school.
just to clear
things up, I fell out of the tree AFTER Elder Toole called you... and
I'm fine. really. I just got a stick stabbed into my side and i didn't
pull it out 'till the next day so it's nice and infected for now. But
it's healing and doesn't really hurt anymore :) no worries.
This past week has been okay for the work, we didn't teach as many
lessons or find as many people as we hoped, but it's been okay. I'm
really trying to change how missionaries work in this area i'm serving
in, Mountain View North, and making that transition has been kinda hard
but it will pay off in the end. For the past few years all the
missionaries in this area have been mostly working in the city of San
Gabriel, which is where all the chinese move to when the first come to
the Los Angeles area. Because of that, lots of them have no jobs, are
really unstable, or illegal. You find a LOT of chinese, but you rarely
find the people that are going to last in the church. We're trying to
move completely out of San Gabriel up to working all day in Arcadia,
because thats where people have stable lives and have families. Those
are the people that the Lord has prepared up to the point of being able
to accept the restoration in their lives. We're still working on finding
the most effective way to work in Arcadia, and because we're showing
our faith the Lord has already given us quite a few blessings, we have
lots of really good potential investigators, that, if they turn out to
be ready to accept the gospel, could make some awesome improvements to
our ward. It's kinda hard right now but it will be awesome for the
chinese work in the long run! Some sad news though... Lydia and her mom
haven't been able to meet with us for a while now and it's not looking
like they are going to be able to. She called the other day telling how
grateful she is that we could meet with her and teach for this long...
which kinda was a hint that she won't be able to teach her anymore :( I
don't know if it's her husband, or if it's because she's just to busy.
Hopefully we can find out this week.
Tonight we're teaching the Geng family in our ward. The mom and
18 year old son are members but the father isn't. He's been meeting with
missionaries for about 7 years now and has come to church every single
week since then, but for some reason he won't get baptized. He even has a
sort of calling in our ward as the "ward cook" haha. He cooks for all
of our activities. While studying this morning I was thinking all about
him and what we could possibly do to help him realize that he needs to
be united with his family. I thought a lot about the role of the father
in a family and how awesome of an example Dad has been to me. I thought
of one certain experience when i was 14 or 15 years old when dad came
into my room before I went to bed and said "I want you to know you can
tell me anything. no matter what it is, I will not be dissapointed or
judge you." Looking back on that, I noticed just how much that one
experience has changed my life in so many ways. I've always known I can
trust my father. They also have a 5 year old son that they just brought
to America from ShanDong, so tonight we're going to teach them the
importance of the role of the father. I'm going to share that
experience, and I really hope that he'll see how important it is for him
to be a good example to his sons by joining the church and partaking in
the ordinances of the temple.
My watch broke again... so i'll probably send that back. I
might just buy a cheap one from wal-mart. We'll see. But for now, have
another good week! I love you guys!
Love, Ben.
(This is an Elder serving in the Chinese program in Ben's Mission, he is from Beijing China. Even the Chinese Elder is taller than Ben ;)... but not nearly as handsome!)
No comments:
Post a Comment