HEY! So all the exciting stuff always happens on the weekend, here's the wrap-up!
We started off that day by having the normal things, lunch, and contacting! Then we had district meeting at the Cera building, the sisters showed up half an hour late and left 30 minutes early. What does that add up to? a 30 minute district meeting. It was kind of annoying but we got over it.
After district meeting we got ready and took campbell back to their apartment, and went to a service with this american taiwanese lady named Jayne that lives on the top of the Seven Springs neighborhood in Cupertino (super rich, super big houses) and so we got there and she was going to help us to move a turtle habitat in her back yard, but instead we went and helped her clean her shed out, eventually the sisters showed up and we were able to serve with the sisters (the three sons are all YSA's) so got to know Sister Yu better (yes we have a chinese sister in our district! awesome!!) so excited to have her here, and to get to know her. She's from Shanghai, went to school in Finland, and got baptized there. Now she's here. So pumped. We had a really good service with them, and just had a good time, after that, we headed off to the church to meet with Rocky, he seems to have a lot of problems, he says he has a terrible life, and a terrible amount of immaturity. We asked him if he would be baptized, but he said a lot of excuses like immaturity, and wanting to be baptized in the Jordan River. Anyway that was that.
After Rocky we headed off to the Davis's home, we thought the appointment was at 7... but it wasn't. it was at 7:30. Oops. Awkward, anyway Brother Davis let us in and asked if we had eaten yet, and we hadn't (we were really starving) and so we sat down at ate leftovers from the night before (stroganoff, yum) and so we waiting for a while and Ellie was late, she called Sister Davis and was like oh man my car died, and I had to call AAA, sorry! Will be there in 10 minutes! So around 7:50 or so her and her daughter Rita showed up and we were able to talk to them about the gospel. The spirit was definitely present and I think both of them had been able to feel it. We talked about Heavenly Father, and Prayer, and also the Book of Mormon, she seemed to really like it. She said a few years ago she really did believe in God, but lately she has been able to read the Bible and the Book of Mormon and really be able to develop her faith in that. Her daughter doesn't seem super duper interesting, but she is willing to listen. Her daughter is 14 years old, so we are trying to find her friends in the branch/stevens creek to help her interest level rise.
It was a really good lesson and we really were able to commit her to reading and praying this week, and we set a return appointment with her.
Saturday!?!
Saturday morning was super good! Contacting at the flea market, got my lucky 1958 quarter (reference to the movie "No Country for Old Men") and was able to get a new 5 dollar pair of sunglasses to wear when I drive (my old pair got broken sort of) anyway got a few contacts, and then we headed up to Palo Alto to teach Christina! Looking forward all week to seeing her again, she is such a sweet heart. She really is. We talked about prayer and Heavenly Father for a while and asked her a lot of questions and translated for her father and mother. Then we asked her if she was able to pray at the end. This is pretty much her prayer:
天父，高兴两位传教士能够来这边让我学习关于神的事情， 感谢可以有个机会学习福音带来的祝福，奉基督的名，啊门.
quite remarkable that a girl from china that has never really learned about Christ can say a prayer that is that sincere and formal. It was really really good. What a sweet girl.
After that we had a lunch, and then headed over to have a lesson with Liu Dixing and Sida.
We got there, and they were both sitting near each other, but not next to each other, because I don't think they suspected it. Anyway we introduced them to each other and turns out that they live on the same floor in their apartment building. How funny. We talked about the Gospel of Jesus Christ with Sida, and read 2 Nephi 31 with them (he had read the whole thing in his personal reading already) and he came up with the typical 3 questions that people ask from that Chapter which are "The Lamb of God" "The form of a dove" and "Baptism of Fire" and so we talked about how important these 5 steps of the gospel are, and what it means to him.
Liu Wenlan really helped a lot and was able to help Sida understand better the view of the member and everything. It was really good. After we finished with Sida, we headed over did some more visits with people in South San Jose and then rushed home, got our suits on and headed over to a child of record baptism.
We had invited the McQuinn family to the baptism since it was going to be in Chinese so that Christina could come along and watch a baptism in Chinese, so we showed up, and Brother McQuinn rearranged everyone so that we could sit next to Christina. He feels its pretty important for her to get to know us better. She likes us just fine, since last week she has opened up and talked to us a lot more. It’s really great. I was asking her questions to see what she was understanding and not understanding. She seemed to understand what was going on very generally. It was a good experience for her I think. She has grown more accustomed to me and Elder Fisher. It has been good getting to know her better this past week. Her parents are convinced that her success in learning the gospel is directly tied to how much she trusts us.
Anyway after the baptism! We headed over to a referrals house that invited us over for dinner. We showed up, and Chenxin (the guy we had been talking to over text for about a week) and two of his roommates were there. Both of them were around our age, 21 or 22. Something like that. Anyway one of the roomates was Christian and went to another Chinese Christian church, and Chenxin and this other roommate (his name is JK) are atheist/agnostic, anyway so the Christian one was like just come to our members house to have this potluck, it’ll be good. You can talk to more Chinese people and all of this stuff. We kind of responded like “well if you insist but I feel like this won’t be the best idea since we are representing another church” so anyway we end up going anyway and it’s this apartment in Cupertino, and we go in and people are pretty welcoming, but kind of thinking how weird it is that we are there, and so we just sit down with the two guys agnostic and start talking, and they are asking us questions about God and how to know him and things like this, and they are both genuinely intrigued, and so we talk for about 20 minutes, and then more people start piling into this apartment, and theres the pastor, and he comes in and is like freaking out he comes up to us and says “根我出来，好吗？so we go out with him and he says to us “我请你们离开“ but he says it pretty rudely, and so the two atheist guys were like freaking out thinking why in the world would they kick us out? But we had to leave, and they just came with us. We got to our cars and they were saying “Lets just go out to eat, we can treat you” so we got in our cars, and followed them to a place called 刘家香 which is a Shanghainese restaurant kinda close to our house, it has shanghai style dimsum and regular dinner dishes things like this, so we ordered, and we just talked about the church the whole time, they loved it. We ended up getting a return appointment with both of them. They were astonished quite literally.
We finished dinner, headed to Helena’s house, and had a quick “planning session” with her on her baptism. She just wanted to set a time and things like this. It was good. 12:30 on November 16th.
SUNDAY!
So yeah all the exciting things happen on the weekends. The weekdays are pretty normal and we have the usual finding and teaching but all the new invesitgators and things like this happen on the weekends.
Sunday was good, we had a good time at church, and Christina and her dad showed up for Sacrament meeting at 12:30 with us too. So she had her first all Chinese sacrament meeting. She had a lot of questions, and was intrigued by the weird accents that she heard (a lot of the congregation is Taiwanese..) and so anyway it was really good. We had a lesson with Chenxin’s friend JK and it was really good. Not much to say about it. Dinner, trying to visit people, and contacting wrapped up our weekend.
Really nice week, start of a new transfer, crossing my fingers for 11 more weeks here, we'll see.
Elder Sanchez
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