10/27/13

Hello family and friends! 大家好!

I feel like I have seen incredible miracles this week just with our ward. Our relief society president really seems to be warming up to us, even though she fanged us. We saw her Thursday night and yesterday and genuinely smiled at me both times. She also set to meet with us again on Saturday and seemed like she really means it. This is a miracle to me. Our ward seems to slowly become more and more welcoming. Yesterday I also finally got to meet some of our RCs. Such a strange experience to just be meeting the ward when I've been in the area a full 2 weeks already.

Best miracle this week was our new investigator. We met her last week after 2 days of finding with no success, not even a single lesson and we were on our way to dinner before heading to Jinhua for stake conference. Well, her little boy was staring and me so I started talking to him, he's somewhere around a year old. Well, I started talking to her and she said she wanted to go to a christian church and learn more about our beliefs but she didn't know where any were. Then, she said that her husband had told her there was one nearby but she could never find it. Weird thing is, there is a Christian church right next to where we were standing, I could see its huge cross. That day we were able to give her a Book of Mormon. Well, we met with her on Saturday and she's started reading the Book of Mormon a little bit, mostly just flipping through it. But she's so open. We invited her to baptism and she said she didn't want to give herself stress because she's never sure about her time but she really does want to work towards it. She also said she wants to come to church this coming Sunday. Yesterday she couldn't but she said this Sunday we can probably walk with her to church to show her where it is! YAY! She is definitely a miracle.

The temple was incredible. Sadly, we don't have the new temple video but it was incredible to be able to be in the temple again. 6 months is WAY too long! I never want to do that again. I feel like I had a good talk with Heavenly Father while sitting there too, always nice.

Thursday we had specialized training and President kinda made the hint that our mission might be phased in next year. He said something about smart phones or something coming next year. Hey, maybe my mission will be phased in before I leave. Haha, watch, it'll happen the transfer before I go home... I enjoyed specialized training though. Once again, President talked about being exactly obedient, apparently that's been a problem lately since he talked about it in zone conference too. Funny thing is, in zone conference he told us that we're all basically disobedient missionaries since few missionaries ensure they take an hour for lunch and an hour for dinner. He told us if we are not doing this we needed to repent because we are not being exactly obedient. That's a new one for me :)

In specialized training they also did training on family history. It was cool. I need to get better at using that awesome tool. Someday I'll be a truly awesome missionary and using all the tools available to me :)

I'll also be awesome enough to able to read and write Chinese so not relying on a translating tool to understand what old investigators are complaining about. haha sorry for that tangent. I just got an e-mail from one of my investigators in Taidong and she's telling me a lot of the things she doesn't like. Sadly, translation tools are unreliable especially when they're connected to the e-mail. And sadly, I barely read like, 20 characters, and can't type any. So sadly, I don't get to be much help to her anymore :( At least she writes me, already knowing this, right? haha.

So yea, I think that's about it for this week. Hope all is well in your neck of the woods!

Ai ni-o!

Sister Thomsen

湯姐妹

(let's be honest, I'm more 湯姐妹 than Sister Thomsen anymore since few people call me Sister Thomsen even among all the foreign missionaries, we still just tend to go by our Chinese names. It'll be weird to only speak english when I come home... I don't know if I can do it!)