每周信函2014年3月24日

This week has been really good, I am so tired. It's monday morning and I am just so so tired. We got 24 lessons, a baptism, lots of translation, and everything else. It's been pretty crazy. Just really tiring. We have 4 people in our apartment, and it's pretty annoying to hear "Well you're going home soon anyway" and "Less than 5 months, you're nearly dead"

This week we have been working with Wu Tao again, I think most of you remember him from a while ago. We met him sometime last July or August. Wu Tao dropped us about a month+ ago, but when I came back I didn't care. He said "I moved away, sorry I can't meet with Mormons anymore" so I went back a few weeks and he opened the door and let us in to teach him. We met with him on Monday, and talked to him about his family situation right now, and so we told him we completely understand that his family is in a different church and don't quite understand the church. We talked to him about still being faithful that they will be able to accept the gospel, and keep having faith in his testimony. We met with him the day after and had dinner with him at his apartment, he made us good food, and we talked about fatherhood and how he is doing a lot for his family already.

Wednesday we went to DeAnza to do contacting and we had 2 really good lessons there, both of them were non-Chinese though. We gave those referrals to the respective areas, and it was a good day. We didn't have any dinners signed up from Mon-Wed within the Branch, but we managed to get dinner in one way or another so it wasn't too bad either. Wednesday we also got to meet with Helena, she is just super stressed out. But we shared a scripture about how through the Atonement we can overcome our negative feelings and hardships.

Thursday was a slow day too, only 2 lessons but we had a few English Classes and had a good day, even though on the numbers it was slow. It was good though! We met with one of our less actives Lu Zhou. It was a good lesson, and he may be receiving his Patriarchal blessing soon.

Sherry! We met with her on Friday to talk about the Law of Chastity, it was a really good lesson because she had a lot of good questions, particularly about homosexuality. It helped her to understand everything within the churches view on things and all of that. It was a good lesson. Then that night we had dinner with our other progressing investigator Angela! We met at the Thompson's house for dinner, and it was really good. We had a great lesson with her on the Restoration and watched the 20 minute Joseph Smith movie. She believes it, and reads the Book of Mormon every day as it is. She wants to be baptized with Sherry also on April the 6th, because she is afraid to be baptized alone.

Saturday, was a great day. 6 lessons. We started off our day with meeting with a referral from the Oakland Mission, this gals name was Li Jun, and her mom also came along, her name was Li Ping, and we met in front of the MLK Library downtown (I parked there, downtown, and failed to realize that i didn't pay for parking meter, because San Jose's parking meters aren't like the meters in NYC, they are electronic ones on the end of the road, so I got a 40$ ticket... annoying)

Anyway we met with them, and they are already Christian, we taught about the restoration, and they really enjoyed it, so we invited them to church.

After that we had a member present lesson with Brother Lee, at our other progressing (sorta) investigator Simon Luo, we taught about Tithing, and how we give 10% of our income to building up the Kingdom of God on the earth. Simon had a lot of questions, and he just really doesn't like to follow commandments, so he made up a lot of excuses, but he agreed to follow it.

We went throughout our day, and did the rest of our visits. That night, we had dinner with the Wu 吴 family, Ellie and Ritta were there, they are both pretty much members of the church already, we had a great dinner, it was delicious. Then we shared the plan of Salvation with them, and it opened up into a long drawn out discussion, that unfortunately we couldn't participate in because we had to leave, so we ended, and finished with a prayer, and headed off to visit the last people we had for the night.

Sunday was quite possibly one of the best days of my mission, it was really awesome. We had church like normal but then we had Sacrament meeting. Pres Law asked me to do live translation side by side for our visitor who was President Clark, one of our mission presidency's counselors. He had 45 minutes to talk, and so he would speak a few sentences, and then I would translate. It was crazy. I had some problems with some areas (namely translating an experience about being on an airline, and talking about certain parts of the plane) but it went really well. Didn't think I was to that level yet, but The Lord certainly helps us in our time of need.

After that we had a linger longer, Christina and her family were there, Christina really misses eating Chinese food 中餐 so she was happy to come to our linger longer lunch get together, she was a happy girl sunday and it was fun. After the linger longer we headed to Menlo Park to meet with Cindy, one of our newer investigators, and then afterwards we prepared for the baptism which was in the same building we met with Cindy in, how convenient.

Christina XiaoQiao McQuinn was baptized and confirmed as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was a wonderful baptism, and I will never forget this day. She feels like a part of my family too. I love her like a little sister, such a great little girl. The baptism was wonderful, we had to translate both the talks, and the confirmation prayer, but it went really well.

The rest of the night was just great, we had a great dinner, and one last lesson with Owen to top off the week with 15 non member lessons.

Spiritual thought of the week, 3 Nephi 20:40, it talks about those who publish peace, such as missionaries. This scripture specifically references Jesus Christ himself, but we can all apply this in the same way to us, we can all become good missionaries, in any phase of our life. We have to just have the courage to invite, and I know that as we do so, that how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings unto them of good, that publisheth salvation that saith unto Zion. Thy God reigneth!

Have a great week.

Elder Sanchez

每周信函2014年3​月18日

19 month mark, pretty crazy.

Okay, well another week to tell. It's been a great week. We had a lot of great success, and are helping our investigators progress!

To update you on some investigators progress:

Ellie and Ritta are doing well, Ellie has been really a bit distraught lately because she feels "internet pressure" to be baptized even though right now doesn't seem like to be the right time for her to be baptized.

Our investigator Owen that we found probably like in July of last year, he is 15, and from China is progressing really well. We had a really awesome lesson with him this past week, and we invited him to be baptized. He said he would! So his baptismal date is April 19.

Angela! So we contacted Angela in November, and our first lesson with her was right after I left Cupertino for Redwood City, so she is progressing so well. Her mom came from China and told her she doesn't need to be baptized, but her testimony is there, and she is so prepared. Her mom finally left back for China so Angela has officially come back to church. We had a lesson with her this past Friday, and invited her to make another Baptismal date. Her date is now April 12 of next month.

Christina McQuinn, the adopted girl from Huainan, Anhui China is getting baptized this weekend, after about 5 months of straight teaching, she is ready to be baptized, and just in time for her older brother to get his mission call. We will see pictures this weekend!

Finally, Sherry Chen, she's the best. One of the best investigators I've had so far. I think I told you a lot about her last week, she's 18 from China, going to DeAnza, she said she wasn't really that happy about a new Elder coming to meet her, but she has certainly warmed up to me in the past few weeks. It's been really awesome. She is progressing towards baptism really well, and she will probably be baptized April 12 as well along with Angela. She's just too nice of a girl. She wears (prescription mind you) glasses that are the lenses with like cat ears on the top. it's really cool.

Those are our more progressing investigators right now. We have a lot lot lot of them coming out of the woodwork right now, we have about 30 people steadily meeting with us, at least once a month. 20 of them are once a week. We pretty much got a new investigator this week named Melvina, she is a formers daughter, she is also 18 years old and just awesome. 

That's about it for me this week.  

Love you all,

(Rachel and Matt, welcome to the best place on earth: Silicon Valley, if you move to the Southern part of Santa Clara, you will see me every sunday in the same ward building, that'd be pretty weird)

Elder Sanchez

每周信函2014年3月10日

3/10/14

I'm baaaaaack! I am now serving in the Seven Springs Chinese Branch, once again. It's awesome. We have a lot of work, and a lot of people to teach. I'm glad to be back. My companion has been out 7 months, his name is Elder Zollinger, he's from Logan UT originally but he has been living in Hong Kong, and other parts of China for the past 10 years or so, so he's cool. His chinese is pretty good for 7 months.

So to detail our week, we had a really good week, with 18 non member lessons in total, the first day we had here we went and visited a less active i'm pretty familiar with named George Wang (Wang Dingzai) and he recoginized and remembered me despite his progressing alzheimers, we taught him the Plan of Salvation, and his nonmember wife was in proximity making food and listening to what we were saying, even commenting on certain points. So that was good, we were able to go and visit people throughout the day, and at 7:30 we had our English class with Ellie. We taught Ellie and Ritta when I was last here, and they were progressing towards baptism, but she is waiting for her to go to China to ask her parents for permission to get baptized, since her dad said "no" over the phone. This is a kind of typical deal in Chinese culture is big things like this, even though Ellie is in her 40's, to get permission from the parents. So we are waiting on that.

On Wednesday, we had some appointments in the morning, one with a new investigator named Ben Luo, we met at DeAnza, and was able to explain the Book of Mormon to him, and explain what we teach to people and how it can help and bless him. We did that and set a return appointment with him. We had lunch, and then at 2 we had another English class with a guy named Mr Fang, he is from Beijing, and he lives right by the church, so right now we are teaching him english once a week at the church. We contacted at DeAnza, had a great dinner with a member in the Saratoga Ward, and then visited less actives the rest of the night.

One of the highlights of my week was we got a call from the mission office to give a man and his wife a blessing that were members of the church, but not from this area. They are called the Azevedo's. They're from San Diego, and Brother Azevedo had a sudden need for a triple bypass surgery while working up here with his wife, and so were able to give them a blessing, both the husband and the wife, and we visited them every day this past week until they were released on Friday evening. The nicest family, they are full of faith and love, and I really appreciated their faith in asking for a blessing.

We have a newer investigator named Sherry that a member brought to church, she is 18, and she has become good friends with Helena, (Helena wasn't the one that brought her to church, but she is friends with her now) she's from Mainland China, and is really loving the gospel so far, she was at church, and even took the bus from West San Jose to get to church. (the person who gives her a ride usually is in utah, but she wanted to come anyway so she took the bus, good faith) So we had a lesson with her this past week, and Helena mentioned that she was nervous about getting a new missionary here (even though she had only been taught for 2 weeks before I came?) so a little more pressure on me for this lesson, but it ended up working out really well, we taught the Gospel of Jesus Christ and I always tell the story about how Granny was driving home one night and how she was prompted to stop on a texas road because there were cows (I think?) Crossing the road. How important the Holy Ghost is in our lives and how we need to heed it's promptings. When I told her that story she said "Wow... that's pretty awesome" in English... even though I told that story in Chinese. She really opened up a lot, and even sat by us at church. It was really good.

Another highlight, was that my companion has a lot of family that lives in the area, distant relatives and people that are 2nd Cousins, or something other. So we had dinner with a family in our stake that the wife is his 2nd cousin, and her maiden name is Zollinger as well, anyway this was absolutely just crazy rich, and the husband was a maxillofacial surgeon for 31 years, and so he just has so much money. But we had a wonderful, (and too long) dinner with them. He told us he wanted to show us something, so we went to his garage and saw this wonderful machine. Ferrari 458 Spyder. With a pricetag of $318,000. He just bought it around 3 weeks ago, and he was explaining to us that you have to sign a contract with Ferrari before you buy it to say that you won't sell the car for at least 2 years, and if you do that you first have to offer the car to sell back to Ferrari because on the black market in certain countries you can buy the car from Ferrari for the pricetag of $3xx,000 and then the next day you can sell it for more than $100,000 more, so somewhere in the $4xx,000 range. Pretty interesting stuff. I wonder if one day I would ever even have the money to afford something like this.

We had another really good lesson with a really progressing investigator named Simon Luo and he is awesome, he's like 23 and from China, studying here at DeAnza College in Computer Science of course, anyway we didn't teach all the way Word of Wisdom last time, so we wanted to go over it with him, and so we did, and we read Doctrine and Covenants 89 with him to help us explain since he was a little bit confused, and it said "hot drinks" and he was like really confused and upset about that, because we told him that meant tea and coffee, and so we kept going back and forth about it, and finally I just felt like to make an example out of the Chinese language. I told him, okay, Simon. What does 冷饮 (lengyin) mean in English? He responded with like it's cold drinks. (that's exactly the literal translation) and then I asked him what it contains in that category, and then he said well... ice cream, slushy, soda, juice etc etc. and I said exactly, in your mind and in the mind of all the chinese people that's what lengyin is, well in the mind of Joseph Smith and all the people that lived in that part of the US, hot drinks, that meant coffee and tea, and all of the modern day prophets have confirmed that. He finally got it and literally spent like a minute just thinking silently and said "I got it, it finally makes sense" and so we invited him to pray about it and also about everything else we taught.

Finally, I gave a talk this week, Elder Fisher, my old companion here in this branch, had the assignment to give a talk on D&C 4, about missionary work, but since he got transferred, and I got transferred back in, I gave the talk, and it was so good to see everyone again, people were so surprised that I had been back, and it was a joyous occasion. My talk didn't go too bad! I did pretty well for not speaking much Chinese in the past 3 months, so it was really cool. I didn't really have to read it off a paper like last time I gave a talk last July. That was really awesome.

I am really happy to be back here in the Seven Springs Branch, and I am happy that I probably will be finishing my mission here, that will bring me to a grand total of 12 months spent serving here in this branch. Woohoo!

Elder Sanchez

Email Semanal 3 de Marzo 2014 (last email in spanish program)

Hey everyone, I'm getting transferred! I've had a great time being here in the Spanish program here in Redwood City! 

I don't have much to write this week besides it was an awesome week. I knew generally I was going to get transferred, and so here I am. Today is my last day here in Menlo Park area, the best zone in the mission. I am off back to my old area (more than likely, there is only one Chinese elder getting transferred, and he is my old companion Elder Fisher in Cupertino.)

We had a week that was really good, and we got a ton done, Elder Phillips my companion really didn't want me to get transferred, he even told President Watkins in his interview 2 weeks ago, asking if I could stay, but I really want to go back to my mission language, my Spanish has gotten decent, it's definitely not perfect or even excellent, but it's okay. It's a good foundation to set for the future. 

I am going to school in Idaho for those who care to know, I will start September 15, so i will be home for almost a month before I go to school.

Anyway, it's been fun, here comes Chapter 4 (probably the last chapter) of my mission: Cupertino once again!

Love,

Elder Sanchez