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
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