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