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