每周信函2013年6​月24日

Hey everyone, this week was the last week of the transfer. No one got transferred here this transfer, Elder Anderson is probably moving next transfer though. We'll see for sure.

Anyway this week has been really great, we had a lot of great success this week. We almost hit our goal of 15 lessons by only 1. And we got plenty of contacts too (missed our goal by a few too.) so this week we'll be working hard to meet our goals.

So Helena, she is doing really well. I am still firmly believing she will be baptized on July 13th. On August 12 she moved to China for about a month and she will be back Sept 21, so hopefully before then, we'll see. By the time she gets back i'll be in my 4th transfer here.... chances are i'll be here until December, but we'll see.

So Howard is a new investigator that we have had for a few weeks now. We took him up to the Oakland Temple this past Saturday and it went really well, he really enjoyed it a lot, and the Sisters really taught him well that went through the tour. Both the sisters that taught him I know pretty well now since I've been up to the temple so many times, I had my all chinese tag on without my english name and they still knew I was Elder Sanchez. Sister Li from Hong Kong and Sister Liu from Macau.

We went to lunch in Fremont on the way home, to one of my favorite restaurants there, Hong Kong Buffet. So that was good.

Generally it's been a really good week, I hope you guys watched the Missionary broadcast last night. All the missions are going to use the internet more in the missoinary work, and our mission is adopting Facebook (and since we're Chinese speaking, we'll probably use QQ instead of Facebook) so that'll be interesting. It will be used every day... so wow. A lot of time on the computer.

Also, Alan the new investigator of ours is really progressing well. He is really starting to develop his faith. He just doesnt understand why he needs to be baptized. We'll keep working with him.

Love you all, hope this week treats you well.

-Elder Sanchez

每周信函2013年6月17日

Hello. This week has been great, and also writing my journal on my iPod with my bluetooth keyboard is almost as good. I now have a way of writing detailed, long journal entries with pictures and video and it only takes 20 min/day to write in. So easy, so great. I won't be sharing all of my entries but i'll definitely attach some for you all to read and watch.

So Helena... first of all. Is doing really well, so trusts us so much now. It amazing to see her progress. I invited her last lesson to be baptized on July 13th. She said "No, I am not ready yet" but I told her that I know she will be ready on that day and will be baptized on that day, she just doesn't know it yet. 

On Saturday my companion needed to write a talk in Chinese and so did I, I finished mine in about an hour, and his took a lot longer than that. Helena came with us to the Library to help us if we had any grammatical mistakes etc, and so I finished mine, and just talked with Helena got to know her better, she really is starting to trust us.

On Sunday, we asked her if she would come to our talks, but Saturday night she said she had to talk to us about her mom, that she was upset. So we talked to her, and she brought up issues about her mom (her mom is picky on the facts) with facts of the church and how being a part of a church and joining and being baptized in a church is a lot different. So we helped her resolve her concern, helped he understand facts about the church that her mom wanted to know, the most important thing was this though, she said "I need to know if this is true for sure so I can tell my mother that" so we charged her to do so, to find out for sure that it was true. This is what we have been praying for is something like this to come up.

Other investigators that are doing well, Howard is doing pretty good, he said he won't read the book right now because his grandma said we don't believe in the trinity. So to bounce back we invited him to come up to the Oakland temple with us. So this Saturday we're going. 

Allan we didn't have a chance to meet with this week, everytime we went over it was a bad time.

So pretty cool experience, we felt prompted to go and see this former investigator named Kevin we figured he is 17 or 18 now, since this record from was 3 years ago, and we went and visited him at 8:30 on Friday night, and we sat down and got to know him and said he was Atheist. We then taught him what we call the 'bigfoot' lesson, which is a lesson on faith and growing your faith. He accepted to keep the lessons going and now we'll teach him once a week!

We are doing a lot better on numbers, this week there is a challenge by the ZL's (The are serving in Los Gatos Ward, which is the richest area in the South Bay) and one of the members has offered a ride in their Aston Martin (fancy car) for whoever has the most contacts this week. So we'll be seeing about that ;)

That was a week, I gave my first full Chinese talk this week which was great!

 and I went to a Chinese bakery that asked me where i'm from in China and I said in chinese "I'm american" and she said in Chinese back "Oh oh you are an ABC then" (ABC means American Born Chinese) 

On that note! Have a great week!

每周信函2013年6月10日

So this week!

Has been good, we have 2 more new investigators, and our teaching pool is getting larger. We are truly working from scratch. We are working very hard to get new investigators.

Howard is the investigator we met through the church parking lot! We met with him this week and taught him the restoration and he loved it, he thinks it makes a lot of sense. He said "I'm so glad we have this set up where I can help your chinese and you can help me get my faith and come to church" 

It really is a miracle though, we are meeting with him twice a week now.

Allen is a guy we met through a member, it's her son, and we are working closely with him, he has depression really bad and the gospel is helping him, he really is trying his best to stay positive but as you know depression is a serious thing, so we are doing the best we can.

We are working with Helena very closely too! We met with her last week and resolved a few of her concerns, she wants to be baptized for sure, but she is very wary or when because "It's something sacred, that I don't want to attach a number to." Elder Anderson said the weirdest thing to me this morning when we woke up, he said he had "revelation" and this honestly came out of nowhere but he said "I think you are going to become Helena's husband" I was like what the? That's so weird. It really is weird. I think he was half asleep or something, i'm not sure he remembers he said that. 

Besides that totally weird statement by Elder Anderson, she is doing well, she is slowly moving forward, much like Yang Chen Chen was.

We have been going through our area book pretty religiously looking for former investigators that we could visit, and we found around 15 that we have visited throughout the week, put about 700 miles on our car since last sunday doing these visits, but we have established meaningful contact including weekly meetings with 5 people, 2 set up meetings with us. One of these contacts was down in Hollister, CA. Which is about an hour south, really far away. 

每周信函2013年56月3日

Hey everyone!

New week, new stories!

So this past week we were still a little ill, we aren't as effective as healthy missionaries are, but we still got two new investigators!

Ones name is Allan, he is the 25 year old son of a LA member here in this branch, he has a mental breakdown about a year ago, which caused him to be very depressed, and we went to this LA's home to talk to her, but only to find out Allan wanted to meet us, he wants to change his life, he wants to have the courage to get a job (he has a BA in Accounting) so we met with him and he wants to meet with us every week and learn about the Gospel! Really great, the Gospel has already given him lots of hope and light in his life and he hasn't learned much yet!

Second is Howard, he's a 19 year old Mainland chinese young man that the Los Gatos elders met in our church parking lot, he wanted to meet with us to help us with Chinese at first, and we did, but at the end we invited him to take the lessons! Yes!! So excited, he's a really cool guy and he wants to meet with us TWICE a week! Not once, twice! So excited!

On Saturday we had the opportunity to set up a booth at the biggest flea market in this area at DeAnza College. We were there from 8 Am to 3 PM and we got as a companionship and 600 contacts, 2 phone numbers, and about 40 books of mormon placed! Really cool, but at the end an elder grabbed my ipod and he slipped and dropped it! shattered into a million pieces, he felt so bad because he knows I use it day in and day out to study... so he gave me 200 dollars to replace it... so nice of him and I'm grateful.

I got my new iPod today, newest generation. really cool thing for sure!

I hope everyone has a good week! Love you all,

Elder Sanchez