Chinese New Years celebration

February 27, 2007
Dear Everybody,

How are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. It's raining here. It's supposed to be a pretty intense storm today.

I did read the New Era this month. I learned so much about being a missionary - I felt kind of shafted for not knowing this stuff already! I mean, seriously, I am a missionary, I should be able to write it, right? But yeah, I learned a lot. I recommend it highly.

We're doing okay on finding people, but we still don't have any baptisms coming up. Steve Dow is probably the closest. We took him to the fireside with President Garner on Sunday night. It went pretty well. We went with our ward mission leader Brother Lao in his very fast car.

Anyway, about this week. Wednesday, I went on exchanges with Elder Ellis in PQ3 and had a good night. That's the ward where I used to serve. We did some tracting and taught some lessons to some less-than-interested people. That night, we went to Gwen's house for dinner - she was a recent convert when I was serving there. She's still active. She fed us some fairly weird food, but it was still good. That night we went to the Albertson’s parking lot and found some kids. We got six teenage kids to sit down on a bench and we taught them all and answered their questions. We committed them to call for a free Book of Mormon. We'll see if they do.
On Thursday, we did some checkbacks and taught a lesson to Steven Dow. That night we passed out some fliers for the party at 99 ranch. The security guard was out there with us and we taught him as we stood there. He was kind of interested.

On Friday, we did service with Elder Mendoza and Elder Ellis, moving a whole bunch of rocks. That was a good work out. That night, we went and visited Evelyn, and she told us she is very busy lately. We taught her about the standards of the church and told her we'd get missionaries in contact with her when she goes back. She probably won't investigate right now, unfortunately. We also checked on a referral we got in the same apartment complex, and he was nice but busy and not super interested. He gave us his email address, so Brother Lao is going to work on him through email.

On Saturday night was our big New Years party. However, when we were at 99 ranch, we saw an advertisement for a big Chinese New Years celebration down town. So on Saturday morning, we loaded up our display and table into the trunk and went downtown, parked and took our table. There were lots of booths there. Unfortunately, we got kicked out pretty quick. They wanted 300 dollars for us to have a booth. I guess they could do that because they had the streets blocked off and a permit from the city. We tried just talking to some of the Chinese people that we saw, but most of the people there were Americans. So, it was kind of disappointing. I haggled with a Mexican guy who had a booth of Mexican wrestling masks and belts to get a cheap Nacho Libre mask. No, I haven't seen the movie, but I don't care. Have you guys seen Nacho Libre?

The branch's new year party had about 400 people. There were probably 20 Chinese nonmembers there. We taught a few lessons and gave a few Book of Mormons out. No new investigators, though. There was an extremely cool lion dance, where the lions jumped into the crowd and scared all the little kids.

On Sunday we went to the MCRD and taught some lessons. I taught less active members who didn't know much about what we believed but wanted to get back into it.

Yesterday we went to La Jolla to tract. We found a couple noninterested Chinese people, and got in a door of an Indian lady. We taught her about the Book of Mormon and gave her a copy. We also taught this kid we had tracted into before named Tom. He's kind of closeminded, but openminded enough to let us in and listen. If he hasn't read what we told him to by next time, then we're not going to waste any more time on him.

Michelle, if you have any questions from the person that's trying to convert you, just ask me and I can give you advice. Remember, all that your friend has to do to get a testimony is to read the Book of Mormon, ponder, and pray sincerely about it. That's it. It's easy and it works every time. I really really really recommend that you read Preach my Gospel.

Keep sharing the gospel guys. I challenge you to a duel - each week, each missionary is supposed to make an invitation to at least 70 people about the gospel outside of tracting. I challenge the whole family to beat me this week. (This is an idea our mission president gave us.) I'll be talking to seventy, can you guys combined come up with that? Yeah, you'll have to stretch your comfort zone and pray a lot, but I promise you it'll be the best week in a long time. Make it a subject of conversation at the dinner table. There's no reason to hold back, the church is true. Will you take my challenge?

Well, that's about it for this week. We've been tracting a lot. I hope you're all doing well. Thanks for your support and prayers. I love you all.

--Elder Myers