English too

Dear Family,

That's cool that you now have a new Avalon. Is it blue? Oh, I bet it is. What's gonna be the plan with it when I get back?

That's amazing that it's cheaper to fly becky back to utah to do orthodontia. It must be very expensive there... almost like here. It costs a lot more than the $400 a month to keep us supported, but luckily there are people in south america who don't need quite that much money so it evens out. Our apartment alone is like $1200 a month for us 4 missionaries. They're trying to move us into members homes if possible.

I got your letter today; I also got a letter from a lady in the ward. I appreciate her thought in sending a letter and the ward newsletters.

Happy birthday mom! I hope it was a good one! I wish I could have called you or something, but it was just business as usual... actually, yesterday was a really GOOD day for proselyting. We followed up with some potential investigators, and got our first appointment on thursday with one of them named Ling Cao; got in a door, taught a first discussion, and set up another appointment with Wu Lai, who seemed very open to it; got in a door of someone elkington used to know, and as Elkington talked to her (Grace is her name) in english, bearing his testimony and just chitchatting and what not, I taught her mom from China a first discussion. She's a funny lady, but not really interested; she wants to learn english first, she says. Oh, and yesterday morning we also met with Emily again, and here's the big news from this week: She has a baptismal date. Yep! It's set for November 13th. It's not exactly the most solid date ever set, but she's working on preparing herself for that day and hoping she can keep reading and receive a spiritual confirmation. So, yesterday was a pretty positive day, teaching 3 lessons and getting 3 more appointments, two with potential investigators, one which I think has really good potential. But numbers don't matter as much as that we got to see, teach, and help a lot of people yesterday.

But there are also some more exciting things that happened this week. The two new good potentials I wrote about last week that came to church -- well, they're now both officially investigators, bumping our total up to a more comfortable 3. We met with both Mrs. Ma and Mrs. Yan after church in the relief society room with 3 convert fellowshippers (Ronald, Ronald's Mom, and Sister Ding). We had the first of what I guess is going to be a weekly appointment, and for this one, we just all went around the circle and introduced ourselves. The members told their conversion stories, we missionaries told why we're on missions, and Mrs. Yan and Mrs. Ma told about their contact with the church. Mrs. Yan says she has had all the lessons and wants to progress, slowly, towards baptism cause she has some questions. Mrs. Ma says she wants to be baptized by her brother in law when she gets back to beijing in 4-5 months, and wants us to teach her all she needs to know to get baptized. Talk about a golden investigator! She's pretty old (about 70) but very nice and the members really like her. So, we are teaching more people now and that's very exciting.

Another bit of good news from this week is that we actually got our new English ward. It is Penasquitos 3rd ward, and we took it over from the sisters; yesterday we met with them and they handed us over the area book and gave us a 3 hour briefing on the area. So, as a consequence, we'll now have dinners 5 times a week instead of 1, we'll have exchanges most nights so we can do twice the work, and we have 2 investigators we're inheriting, plus some good potentials. So we're going to be supported by that ward too. The support of missionary work out here is a LOT different than I expected, it's much different than in utah. We meet with the bishop/branch president weekly, the ward/branch mission leaders twice weekly, the ward missionaries actually DO things like go on exchanges, etc. It's pretty cool and inspiring. Once this week, we were out at Farrell's for dinner with the Bradshaws, and some members came up to us and gave us $20 to use for food sometime. So, we got a double food help in one night. This old man in the stake named brother bardsley gives us more leftover bread than we could ever use every week, and that helps too. So now our time of fruitless finding efforts is over - we have people to teach, and although we still need to use much time finding, it feels like we have some good leads to use like it should be.

Well, that's all my time that I have. I'll write again next week. Keep the letters coming; I love you all.

Love,
Elder Myers

Two new investigators

I'm glad you're all doing well, too. This week has gone pretty well, and I will tell you about it.

We have met with Emily twice this week, and both time at Sister Ng's house. That is great progress! As I've said, it's far more effective to teach in a member's home, because then you not only have a member's testimony backing up what you say, but that investigator also starts making friends in the church and knows that the members really care about them. So those meetings have gone well. We taught her the word of wisdom on Thursday, and she committed to obeying it. She had to give up drinking tea, like every Chinese person has to, but she'll be fine without it. On Monday we taught her the first principals and ordinances of the gospel all in one (faith, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the holy ghost) but she's still getting hung up on faith. She doesn't feel she's received a spiritual confirmation in her prayers yet, so we need to help her get that faith. We committed her to reading 5 pages of the Book of Mormon a day and being more grateful and humble in her prayers. She realized that she had been very demanding in her prayers ("God, you have to tell me and you have to help me.") and she says "Now I am change my ways. I am going to pray very humber and very grateful." So she is definitely still making progress. Elder Elkington and I have prayed about a date to give her as a goal for being baptized, and we have felt a confirmation, but we haven't presented it to her yet. We meet with her again on Friday.

So, Emily's been our only real investigator, so you might think this letter would end there. But you'd be wrong; we had some very interesting experiences in finding this week, and we now have not one, but TWO promising potential investigators.

The first starts last P-day as we are getting ready to go back out and do another evening of work. We get a call; I answer it. "This is President Garner" I hear, and he asks for Elder Elkington. The Mission President doesn't call missionaries very often, so we knew it was pretty important, whatever it was. So, I told Elkington it was President Gardner, and he thought I was joking, but he was wrong. They started talking, and I heard him say "Elder Groberg.... oh THAT Elder Groberg?!?"

So, what had happened was that President Garner had just got a phone call with a referral from Elder John H Groberg from the Presidency of the Seventy (and from The Other Side of Heaven). There was a grandma-aged woman from china visiting her youngest, pregnant daughter here in southern California, but she also has an older daughter who is an active member and returned missionary in Beijing, China. This visiting lady was interested in coming to church and maybe more, so our job is to invite her to church and teach her if possible before she goes back to China.

So we enlisted some members' help and got her a ride to church. She came, was well-fellowshipped, and we're meeting with her after church next week. So that's really cool that we got a referral from Elder Groberg, and we're taking it pretty seriously, cause we report directly to the mission president on this one, and he reports directly to Elder Groberg.

Another potential investigator we got was a lady from china who just moved here and who just showed up to our Chinese branch not knowing anyone. She had taken the lessons in Hong Kong and actually apologized to one of the members at church for not having been baptized yet. So, we're hoping to start meeting with her too. Apparently, according to Elkington, he has never found a single one of his investigators himself. The lord always gives them to him, and they show up, just like Emily showed up and we started teaching her.

We do do a lot of finding activities anyway, though. We do a lot of tracting. Yesterday while we were tracting, I went on splits with Elder Vanscoyk, an English Elder who is our roommate. We knocked on a door and this 16 year old boy from China answered the door, and I was able to place my first Book of Mormon, which was really cool. We also got in our first almost-bash. I say that because we were talking to this born again lady from Iceland and it easily could have degraded into a bash, but we made sure to try to keep the spirit with us and just testify like we're supposed to. So that was actually a positive experience.

So things are going well here. There's a lot of promise for a couple new investigators, and we need them desperately. So that's very exciting.

Anyway, I have to go. Love you all, thanks for all you do.
Love,
Elder Myers

Dear Grandma and Grandpa Kitchen

Dear Grandma & Grandpa,

It was nice to hear from you. Thank you for your letters. How was
Washington? Did you enjoy the trip up there? How is the Genealogy class
going? I bet it was nice to get to see Jesse again last summer. Thanks
for the tip to date my letters. I am trying to remember to do that.

Does your GPS have maps, too? That's pretty cool that you were able to
use it in Seattle. We use maps all the time here. I bought a street map
book of San Diego County called the Thomas Guide. It was about $30 but
it is indispensable. The roads here are incredibly windey and it would
be impossible to find anything without it. It wasn't laid out like Utah,
that's for sure. I usually end up navigating, since my companion is the
designated driver.

I thought you might be interested to hear about how our mssion is using
genealogy. We use this packet called "The Gift of Family History", where
anyone can fill out a card with some of their genealogical information
and Stake Family History Researchers will do some research on their line
and make a nice binder, then the missionaries go with the researcher and
present it as a gift and along with that, tell why family history is so
important to us. It is supposedly a fairly effective finding tool, so I
thought you might be interested to hear about that. Some missionaries
are using the gift as their primary door approach.

Well, I better go. Thanks for writing! I hope to hear from you again
soon.
Love,
Elder Myers.

Another week

Hi Family,
Thanks for the letters. I don't have much time, so I will try to reply as quickly as possible. That's what happens when I get so much email from you all, it eats into my 30 minutes of email time :P But I don't mind. I might have to send a hand written letter today or something.

So, first of all, the Small and Simple things video... it was actually made in San Jose, according to what I know. Elder Elkington's second companion was transferred down here from the san jose mission and brought it with him. I first saw the DVD a couple days ago, and it is very good, whoever made it! It really helps in member missionary work!

So, this week hasn't been too exciting. We have not made any new investigators, but we have marked even more people off the list of potentials. Hopefully, as we keep working and praying, those who have been prepared will magically appear just like Emily did.

Emily is doing well. We met with her twice since I last wrote. The first time, I was on exchanges with the zone leaders, and we taught a very in depth lesson on prayer, and how our prayers are answered. That was well received and resolved some of her concerns, I think. Then last night, Elder Elkington and I taught the 10 commandments, along with Keeping the Sabbath Day Holy, and the LAw of Chastity. She had been shopping on sundays, but she was willing to give it up. And she didn't really have any problems with any of the other commandments. she was actually really excited to commit to keeping all the commandments that she knows, so we are very happy. She is progressing very well.

We have been doing a lot of tracting without much fruit this week. We may start covering an English ward next transfer, so that way we can tract every house and not just hit a house, skip 3, hit another, skip 5 like we've been doing. We'll get a lot more doors. The problem is that most people aren't home during the day, so we have a lot of time that we don't really have an effective way to use it. We only have 1 investigator, so we don't have that much work; that's why they might give us another ward.

I received the flash memory card today; thank you for sending it. I will send the other card today.

Becky-

That's awesome that you're playing in Jazz band. Those are some great songs that you're playing. I hope that it's fun.

I bet school is hard, but just work hard, I know you can do it. Why is it so hard?

Nope, we aren't allowed to read the newspaper, isn't that sad? We have to concentrate on our missions, but that's a blessing.

I'm glad that your owies are getting better. It sounds like you had a rough fall. Remember that when life gets hard, you grow, right?

Okay, well, I'm out of time. I love you all. Stay safe and healthy!

Love,
Elder Myers

Conference Weekend

Dear Family,

I'm glad you were able to watch conference this weekend. It is great that you had the sister missionaries over for dinner. We went to a member's house for dinner this sunday, the Ng family's house. You can pronounce it Ing, though. Or Woo, if you say it in mandarin instead of cantonese. They speak fluent english, though, and have about 6 kids, the oldest of which just started her first year at BYU. The rest are sons. They are a very nice, very mormon family. Brother Ng is the first counselor in the branch presidency, and Sister Ng helps us with teaching visits sometimes. We ate a good chinese dinner with them and the Cao family. ShuMing Cao is a recent convert. Her husband isn't really interested in the church, but is supportive. She has two daughters, Elena and Michelle, who are 5 and 3 years old. They are very cute and funny. So, after we ate dinner, we all had a big family home evening in the Ng's, where the missionaries taught pretty much the first lesson about the restoration, and shu-ming's husband was there, so it was a good opportunity.

We invited Emily Tsai our investigator to conference and a baptismal service on saturday, and she said she was going to come, but then she got busy and didn't show up. We had even made sure to arrange for some branch fellowshippers (the Ng's) to be there instead of watching at home. So I called her that night to invite her to sunday morning, she said she would come, we arranged for the Ng's to come again. They came, but emily didn't. However, she did show up for the afternoon session, when we didn't have any fellowshippers. So we scrambled and called a few branch members, and some of them showed up. Jensen and I watched that whole session in Chinese, which was exhausting, but I was able to understand a lot of it. Emily really liked the conference, and I think it was a good experience for her. We have talked to her a few times about baptism, and she is open to it if she can develop her testimony. Right now she is kind of hung up about God answering her prayers - she has been praying for a long time for her husband to get a job here in america so her family can be together again, but she says "I dont a feel god is a helping me, do you know?" However, when she came to conference, we were able to give her some Stake Employment Center information. Hopefully that will help her husband and be an answer to her prayers. That's what the church is for, after all. But we have a very good relationship with her, she trusts us, and is learning a lot, so we're still feeling good about her.

We haven't, however, found any more investigators yet. Yesterday evening, Elkington and I went out in the car for a few hours to contact as many people on the Potential Investigators list as we could. We ended up dropping about 5 of them who really weren't all that interested in the church. We met one person on the list who let us in the door, we taught a first discussion, gave her a chinese book of mormon, and said that when we were in the neighborhood we'd stop by again. She wouldn't set up a next appointment... most people don't. Another person on the list was a referral from a temple square visit. We dropped by and gave the book of mormon, kind of talked about what it was about, and invited him to read it. It isn't an especially strong contact right now, but it's a seed. We have to plant many more seeds than the number of souls we reap.

Yesterday after that, we tried calling a family again which had been referred to us, Jerry Lu and Robin Xie. (As a side note, in mainland china, wives don't usually change their surname to match their husbands.) I had talked to robin on sunday, and she had watched general conference and loved it, and she said she was going to call us monday for a time we could visit. But yesterday, Elkington called and jerry answered, and he basically told us to stop trying to contact them, period; they don't have time. So there's not a lot we can do about that. It was actually rather sad, because the lady who referred them has talked so much about how ready Robin is.

How are your missinoary experiences going? You should invite the neighbors over to your house for a family home evening with the missionaries. You know, most people who are taught in a member's home end up joining the church. It's true. I think it's about 70-80%. About 10% of investigators tracted into by missionaries and just taught on their own join the church, so it's a really big difference. Keep praying for missionary opportunities.

Well, I'm out of time, and better go. We are doing well here.

Love you all,
Elder Myers